File Storage — hosted in Lagos
A shared file system in Lagos
One directory, mounted by every server that needs it.
The second application server is where this problem starts. One machine writes an upload, the other cannot find it, and the fix is a cron job that synchronises two directories with a window in the middle where they disagree — usually discovered by a customer, usually in the week the traffic matters. Managed NFS gives every instance the same directory at the same time, with no file server to patch and no capacity to provision. It is coming to ng-1a in Lagos, priced in Naira and held in Nigeria. Tell us what would mount it and we will tell you when it is ready.
- File systems in ng-1a, our Lagos region
- NFSv4.1 with full POSIX semantics — your applications work unchanged
- Mounted by many servers at once, all seeing the same files
- Data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act (NDPA) — your data stays in-country
- Launching soon — priced and billed in Naira
Launching soon · Billed in NGN
Pricing
Pay for what you store, nothing more
Three storage classes, one per-GB price each. No pre-provisioning, no minimums — capacity follows your data, measured hourly. In your currency, no forex.
| Storage class | Price /GB/mo | Throughput | Latency |
|---|---|---|---|
| UniversalPopularGeneral-purpose shared storage for most workloads. | NGN 210 | 100 MB/s, burst to 1 GB/s | ~2 ms |
| FastAnalytics, ML training data, media pipelines. | NGN 360 | 500 MB/s, up to 10 GB/s provisioned | <1 ms |
| BasicInfrequently accessed files, archives, backups. | NGN 24 | 100 MB/s | 10–50 ms |
You are billed on the data actually stored, measured hourly — there is no capacity to pre-provision. Fast provisioned throughput is $0.05 per MB/s, Basic reads are $0.01/GB, and snapshots are $0.05/GB/mo. Prices exclude VAT; local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout.
Why Lagos decides this
A slow bucket is a slow page. A slow mount is a stopped process.
An object store is reached over HTTP, one request at a time, by a client that knows it is talking to a network service. If it is far away the response is slow, and a cache in front of it hides most of that from most users. A mount does not work that way. Your application opens a path and the kernel makes the call on its behalf — a stat, a readdir, a lock, a small write, a metadata update — so a directory listing a local disk answers instantly can be dozens of round trips underneath. When that path is long, the application does not get slower in a way you can measure and shrug at. It waits.
Nigeria has a specific reason to take that seriously. On 14 March 2024, WACS, ACE, MainOne and SAT-3 all went down near Côte d'Ivoire at once; thirteen countries were disrupted, Nigerian bank customers could not transact, and MainOne declared force majeure with a repair estimate of up to eight weeks. A page served from a European origin got slow that day. A file system mounted across that path would have hung, with the processes holding it hung too, waiting on a network that was not coming back on any timescale an operations team could work with. Eight subsea systems land in Nigeria, and the useful property of a file system in ng-1a mounted by instances in ng-1a is that it needs none of them.
That is also why the domestic picture matters. IXPN, the neutral national exchange founded in 2006 by the NCC with the Internet Service Providers Association of Nigeria, now runs 13 points of presence across seven states, and domestic peak traffic passed 2 Tbps by March 2026 — Nigerian traffic between Nigerian networks stays in Nigeria. Your fleet is in Lagos because your users are, and the shared directory belongs beside the fleet, on the region's private network, where the distance is measured in a rack rather than an ocean. It has no public endpoint either: no browser reaches it, no partner integrates against it, and its clients are your own instances, with access points giving each application its own root and its own permissions.
NFSv4.1
Protocol, with full POSIX file locking and permissions
2 Tbps
Peak domestic traffic exchanged at IXPN (March 2026)
1 PB
Ceiling the file system scales to, with nothing to provision
NGN
Quoted, invoiced and settled inside Nigeria
Where it sits next to the rest of the stack
Block storage is a disk for one instance — the ledger's data files, the boot volume, the thing a single process owns. Object storage is an S3 API for archives, KYC captures, media and anything a browser fetches, and it is live in ng-1a today. File storage is the middle case: shared directories, POSIX paths and file locks, for the many Nigerian systems that were built before object storage and are not going to be rewritten this quarter.
The office can mount it too
Over a VPN or a direct link, a machine in your own building mounts the file system exactly as a cloud instance does. In a country where an office server is also a diesel decision, that is usually how a move off on-premises storage begins — both sides mounted, nothing cut over, and the Lagos copy replicated across zones instead of sitting on one disk behind an inverter.
The platform
Everything shared storage should be
Managed, elastic, and replicated — mounted by your whole fleet, with no file server to run.
Fully managed
No NFS servers to provision, patch, or fail over — we run the whole file system for you.
Elastic scaling
Capacity grows and shrinks with your data, from gigabytes to a petabyte, with nothing to provision.
Multi-AZ replication
Every file is synchronously replicated across availability zones and survives the loss of a zone.
Unlimited concurrent mounts
Thousands of instances mount the same file system at once, with real-time consistency across them.
POSIX-compliant NFSv4.1
Full file locking, permissions, symlinks, and hard links — your apps work unchanged.
Encryption everywhere
AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, with keys managed for you or brought yourself.
Lifecycle policies
Auto-tier cold files down to Basic and save up to 60% without moving a thing.
Snapshots
Instant, incremental snapshots let you restore a whole file system or a single file in seconds.
Access points
Per-tenant roots and permissions give each app or team its own view of the file system.
Regions
Lagos is home. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam are one API call away.
Deploy in ng-1a and the machine sits in Lagos, in the same city as most of the traffic it will ever serve. Nigeria makes that easy to reason about: 189.68 million active mobile subscriptions in May 2026, with MTN and Airtel together carrying about 86% of active lines and Globacom and T2 — the operator formerly branded 9mobile — behind them. Whichever of the four your customer is on, they are in Nigeria, and typical in-metro round trips here run around 4 ms.
Nigerian networks now hand traffic to each other in Nigeria. IXPN, the neutral national exchange founded in 2006 by the NCC, runs 13 points of presence across 7 states and more than 130 connected networks, with 400G-capable core switching at three Lagos sites; peak domestic traffic across it passed 1 Tbps in April 2025 and 2 Tbps by March 2026. Before it existed, two Nigerian networks exchanged packets by way of London — an intercontinental journey for a packet crossing one city.
Eight subsea systems come ashore in the country, Equiano landing on the Lagos coast in 2022 and 2Africa at Lekki, which is how Lagos became West Africa's arrival point for international capacity. Aim a request at Frankfurt or Virginia instead and that subsea path joins the critical route of every call the page makes, at typically around 110 to 125 ms before your application does any work. From Lagos, Accra and Nairobi typically sit further away in round-trip terms than London, because traffic between African networks still frequently transits Europe.
ke-1a in Nairobi and tz-1a in Dar es Salaam run on the same account and the same API, which makes a standby or a disaster-recovery plan a configuration rather than a second supplier. Make that call deliberately where personal data is involved: a copy of Nigerian personal data held abroad is a cross-border transfer under section 41 of the NDPA. Machine images and telemetry raise no such question.
Nigeria
Lagos
~4 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria
Kenya
Nairobi
~2 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam
~6 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania
Uganda
Kampala
~3 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Uganda
Use cases
Built for shared workloads
Shared web content
Every server sees the same uploads, themes, and media — no rsync, no drift, no sticky sessions.
Kubernetes RWX volumes
Many pods, one volume. The CSI driver gives you ReadWriteMany persistent volumes out of the box.
ML & analytics
Share datasets across GPU workers with high-throughput reads, no copying between nodes.
CI & dev environments
Shared source, build artifacts, and caches across runners and workspaces, live for every job.
How it works
Shared storage in three steps
Create a file system
Pick a storage class — Universal, Fast, or Basic. There is no size to provision.
Mount over NFS
Run one mount command on any instance — or request a RWX volume in Kubernetes.
Store and share
Capacity follows your data as it grows, and lifecycle policies tier cold files down.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
- Tier III colocation facilities across all live regions
Support
West Africa Time, and a ticket that arrives with the facts
Two channels, doing different jobs. A ticket opened while signed in arrives carrying your account, your region and the instance, so the first reply is about the problem rather than about which machine you mean. [email protected] is the commercial address: a quotation against a purchase order, transfer details before a payment run, the billing account configured with your TIN and registered name before the first invoice, and the SLA terms and credit-claim process in writing while you are still choosing.
Before either, status.lineserve.net. Anything affecting a whole region is posted there faster than a reply could reach you, and checking it turns "my site is down" into "my instance is unreachable and the status page is clear" — a different ticket, and a much shorter one.
What to put in it, in the order it gets read: the region and the instance, the time the behaviour started in WAT, what changed just before it, the actual error text rather than a description of it, and whether it reproduces from more than one Nigerian network. An MTN handset and an office fibre line disagreeing is a different fault from both failing together.
Some of the fastest resolutions need nobody at all, and are worth knowing before the night you need them. Restore an on-demand snapshot. Roll back to a scheduled backup. Open the browser console when SSH is the thing that has broken. Resize or rebuild from the API. Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge.
Nigeria runs on West Africa Time, UTC+1, and does not observe daylight saving — two hours behind Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. A change window agreed in WAT means the same thing in January and in July. Note the offset when you schedule across regions.
Sales
[email protected]Why Lineserve
Managed NFS beats running your own
Running your own NFS server means patching, capacity planning, and failovers when a node dies. A managed, elastic file system takes all of that off your plate.
Pricing & invoicing
Nothing to provision, and a cold tail that prices itself
A file system has no size to choose. You do not provision one, you do not grow one, and there is no headroom to buy — capacity follows the data you actually store, measured hourly, up to a petabyte. That is the opposite of a block volume, which charges for the size you asked for whether or not you filled it, and on a shared drive the elastic shape is the honest one: nobody can forecast what a directory several teams write into will hold after two Nigerian fourth quarters.
Three classes carry three Naira prices: Universal at an indicative NGN 210 per GB a month for general shared storage, Fast at NGN 360 where throughput is the constraint, and Basic at NGN 24 for files that are kept rather than used. The relationship between them is where the money is. Every real shared drive is mostly cold — a working set the fleet touches constantly, and a long tail of finished projects, closed disputes and last season's material. Lifecycle policies move that tail to Basic automatically after a period you choose, cutting the cost of holding it by up to 60%, at the same paths, with no application aware anything happened. Every figure is from Nigeria's own Naira price list rather than a dollar rate converted at page load.
Nigerian VAT on cloud and hosting is 7.5%, administered by the Nigeria Revenue Service — the lowest of the three markets Lineserve operates in, against Kenya's 16% and mainland Tanzania's 18% on the same class of service. Displayed prices exclude VAT and it is shown separately at checkout. The framework around it changed on 1 January 2026, when the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 and the Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025 took effect: a TIN is now central to how a transaction is evidenced, and large taxpayers above ₦5 billion in turnover sit inside the Revenue Service's mandatory e-invoicing regime, enforced from 1 July 2026 with a 31 July 2026 deadline and onboarding through an approved Access Point Provider.
Five fields, sent once
Your TIN, your registered name exactly as the Revenue Service holds it, the billing address, a billing email that reaches finance rather than an engineer, and any purchase-order or cost-centre reference that has to appear on the document. Send those to [email protected] before you order and the billing account is configured once instead of corrected in the third quarter.
Set the lifecycle policy in the first week
On a shared drive the cold tail always wins in the end. A tiering policy applied to a hundred gigabytes is a configuration change; the same policy applied to forty terabytes two years later is a project with a review meeting attached and somebody nervous about which folders it will touch.
The withholding question, raised early
A Nigerian corporate buyer will ask whether it must withhold on a payment to a non-resident supplier, and its withholding agent files a monthly electronic schedule listing each supplier's TIN and address, the nature of the transaction, the amount withheld and the invoice number. Lineserve invoices Nigeria from LINESERVE, INC. On a storage line it is a small number that recurs indefinitely, so put it in front of your adviser at account opening and copy [email protected] so the invoicing matches how you remit.
Prices are indicative launch pricing and exclude VAT; Nigeria's 7.5% is calculated and shown at checkout. Nigeria's tax framework changed on 1 January 2026, so guidance written before that date is worth re-reading before you rely on it.
Data residency
The reconciliation folder is inside the circular too
On 15 June 2026 the Central Bank of Nigeria issued circular PSS/DIR/PUB/CIR/001/004, covering market structure requirements, data localisation, ultimate beneficial ownership disclosure and systemic oversight in the Nigerian payments system. It directs that payment transaction data generated within Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria, with full compliance from 1 January 2027, across deposit money banks, microfinance banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies, payment service providers and super agents. The affected data is reported to reach merchant records, transaction identifiers, timestamps, settlement information and processing logs.
Most of that list gets read as though it lived in a database. A good deal of it does not. Settlement information arrives as files — a partner bank's daily drop, a scheme settlement report, a reconciliation output, a dispute evidence pack assembled for a chargeback — and processing logs are written by several services into one place so one query can read across them. Those are directories, shared by the ledger, the recon job, the operations desk and the reporting stack, and they are the part of an estate most likely to be sitting wherever it was first convenient. A fintech can move its databases and its archives in-country and still be running its settlement share somewhere else.
The general regime sits around that. The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 is the statute and the Nigeria Data Protection Commission the regulator, with the General Application and Implementation Directive — issued 20 March 2025, effective 19 September 2025 — operationalising it, and section 44 requiring controllers and processors of major importance to register within six months. Section 41 restricts transfer of personal data out of Nigeria, permitting it where the recipient is covered by an adequate law, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses, a code of conduct or a certification mechanism. Keep the share in Lagos and that analysis does not arise.
Nigerian localisation is also written by sector and by named system: NITDA's frameworks are reported to require sensitive data in finance, healthcare and government to be held in-country. Build against any of that and the question arrives through a partner bank's procurement form long before a regulator asks it — as one line, wanting to know where the files are.
At launch, a file system created in ng-1a will be held in Lagos and will not leave Nigeria without your instruction. That is data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act. What Lineserve supplies is the location; the assessment, the registration and the sign-off remain with your compliance function, and they are shorter work when the shared directory never left.
Access points are the control a shared drive normally lacks
Per-application and per-tenant roots with their own permissions give each consumer its own view of the file system, so the boundary between a merchant's evidence and another merchant's is enforced by configuration rather than by a folder naming convention. On a store that several teams write into, that is the difference between an access model and a habit.
Replication inside the region, replication out of it
A file system is replicated across availability zones inside ng-1a at no extra cost, which survives the loss of a zone. Cross-region replication to Nairobi or Dar es Salaam is a different decision: a copy of Nigerian data in another country, with section 41 in play for personal data and the circular's position following anything inside its scope. Build artefacts and caches carrying neither raise no question.
Tiering changes the price, not the place
Cold files move to the Basic class inside the same file system, in the same region, at the same paths. When somebody in a compliance review asks whether the archiving policy created a transfer, the answer is no — and being able to say so in one sentence is worth understanding it now rather than during the review.
Who is asking for this
The Nigerian teams that need one directory in several places
The pattern is a fleet or a set of services rather than one machine. Several things read and write the same files, and they expect a path rather than an API.
Fintech settlement and reconciliation shares
The ledger is a database, but the day around it is files: partner-bank drops, scheme settlement reports, reconciliation outputs, dispute evidence packs and the processing logs several services write into one place. The recon job reads them, the operations desk opens them, the reporting stack aggregates them, and an auditor asks for them two years later. One mounted store with per-service access points keeps a single copy of that in Lagos — the country the circular names, for the date it names.
Betting platforms and the shared state around a kickoff
One of Nigeria's largest online sectors and the most abrupt workload in this market: odds ingestion all day, a bet-placement spike at kickoff, thousands of retail agent terminals reconciling against the same backend, and per-state reporting since a November 2024 Supreme Court ruling moved regulation to the states. What the fleet shares is configuration, market definitions, generated report outputs and settlement files — small, hot, and read by every node at once, which is a mount rather than a bucket.
E-commerce fleets through the Nigerian fourth quarter
Retail peaks from late October through Black Friday and the December weeks, and the way most stores meet it is by adding web servers. The moment there are two, the media directory becomes a distributed systems problem: an image uploaded on one machine, a thumbnail generated on the other, a category page that renders differently depending on which server answered. Mount the same path on every instance and adding capacity for the peak goes back to being a capacity decision.
Media and streaming working sets
Nigeria produces an unusual amount of its own film and music. The published renditions belong in a bucket; the pipeline behind them is a share — ingest that several encoders pick work off, mezzanine files, transcode scratch, artwork, and a review tool reading results while the pipeline is still running. The Fast class carries that while it is hot, and lifecycle policies drop finished projects to Basic automatically, at the same paths.
Agencies, ISVs and resellers
Lagos has a dense agency market reselling infrastructure to SME clients — many client sites, each with an uploads directory and a theme tree that has to match across web servers and staging, plus a handover pile at the end of every project. One file system with an access point per client makes the second web server a capacity decision rather than a data migration, and keeps every client's media in the country their own procurement form asked about.
The share on the office server
A great deal of Nigerian document storage still sits on a machine in a corner of the office, which puts it on the wrong side of the power problem: keeping a shared drive alive on-premises means buying diesel, inverters and batteries for it, and a filesystem that loses power mid-write is the kind of thing discovered a week later. Mounted in ng-1a it is replicated across zones, still in Nigeria, and one fixed monthly Naira line.
Indicative launch pricing in Naira: Universal at NGN 210 per GB a month, Fast at NGN 360 and Basic at NGN 24, billed on the data actually stored and measured hourly. Prices exclude VAT. These are the launch figures rather than a charge you can incur today.
Planning ahead
How your shared files get to Lagos when this lands
From rsync, sticky sessions and one machine everybody mounts
Most Nigerian fleets that need this already have a workaround, and the workaround is why somebody is reading the page. Files synchronised between web servers on a cron, with a window in which the two disagree and a customer in the middle of it. Sessions pinned to a machine so a user keeps finding their own upload. Or one server everybody NFS-mounts from, which you patch, monitor and fail over yourself. At launch the move is to create a file system, mount it at the same path on every instance, copy the current contents across once, and delete the cron. What goes away is not a storage cost, it is a class of bug that only appears under load — which in this market means late October.
From the file server in the office
The other common Nigerian starting point, and it carries a risk the invoice never shows. An on-premises share depends on a building's power, and Nigerian business carries that gap itself: the national grid collapsed on 29 December 2025 and again on 23 January 2026, and an estimated 14 to 20 GW of self-generation sits behind it. Mounting the file system alongside the old share over a VPN turns the move into a change of habit rather than a cutover — both sides mounted, the Lagos copy replicated across zones, and the office machine retired when nobody has written to it for a month. What was a diesel line becomes a fixed monthly Naira one.
Tell [email protected] how much the share holds, how much of it was last touched more than a month ago, how many machines would mount it and what reads it today, and you will hear from us when there is something to mount. Migration planning and assistance are included at no extra charge.
FAQ
Questions, answered
A Block Storage volume attaches to one instance, like a disk. A file system mounts on thousands of instances at once over NFS, with every mount seeing the same files in real time. Use Block for databases; use File when fleets share data.
NFSv4.1 with full POSIX semantics — file locking, permissions, hard and symbolic links. Any Linux distribution mounts it natively; macOS and Windows work through their NFS clients.
There's nothing to provision. The file system grows and shrinks with the data you store, from gigabytes to a petabyte, and you pay only for what you actually use, measured hourly.
Yes. The CSI driver supports dynamic provisioning and ReadWriteMany (RWX) volumes, so many pods across many nodes can share the same persistent volume.
Universal gives a 100 MB/s baseline with bursts to 1 GB/s — right for most workloads. Fast starts at 500 MB/s with provisioned throughput up to 10 GB/s and sub-millisecond latency for analytics, ML training, and media pipelines.
Set a policy and files that go unused — say for 30 days — move automatically to the cheaper Basic class, cutting storage costs by up to 60%. The move is transparent; applications keep the same paths.
Yes. Every file system is replicated across multiple availability zones within the region at no extra cost, backed by a 99.99% availability SLA. Cross-region replication is available for disaster recovery.
Point-in-time snapshots are instant and incremental. Restore individual files from a read-only mount or roll back the whole file system, on demand or on a schedule.
Yes. Connect over VPN or a direct link and on-prem machines mount the file system exactly like cloud instances — useful for hybrid setups and migrations.
In ng-1a, our Lagos region. A file system lives in one region and is mounted by instances in that region, and it does not leave Nigeria without your instruction.
It is in build and there is no public date. Send [email protected] what would mount it and roughly how much data is involved and you go on the list — you hear from us when there is something to mount rather than when a calendar says so.
Indicative launch pricing is NGN 210 per GB a month for Universal, NGN 360 for Fast and NGN 24 for Basic, billed on the data actually stored and measured hourly, with nothing to provision and no minimum. Prices exclude VAT. Those are the figures we expect to open with, published so you can plan against them.
Tell [email protected] what would mount it, how many instances, and how much the share holds today. Those conversations decide what ships first, and the teams having them are the ones we come back to when there is something to try.
Object storage is an S3 API reached over HTTP, and using it means your application makes API calls — right for archives, KYC captures, catalogue media and anything a browser fetches. File storage is a mounted directory: the application opens a path, takes a lock, writes a file, and changes nothing. Use a bucket for what you keep and serve; use a file system when several of your own servers must share the same folder.
A block volume attaches to one instance at a time, like a disk, which is what a ledger database wants. A file system is mounted by many instances at once, all seeing the same files in real time. One process owning the data is block; a fleet sharing it is file.
Almost certainly not. It is NFSv4.1 with full POSIX semantics — file locking, permissions, symbolic and hard links — so a Linux instance mounts it natively and the application sees an ordinary directory at an ordinary path. That is why it exists alongside object storage rather than instead of it.
Thousands, concurrently, with every mount seeing the same files in real time. Adding a web server for the December peak stops being a data decision, which is the point of it for anyone running a fleet behind a load balancer.
Yes. A file system created in ng-1a is held in Lagos and is not moved out of the country without your instruction, which gives you data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act (NDPA).
The circular of 15 June 2026 directs that payment transaction data generated in Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria, with full compliance from 1 January 2027, and settlement files, evidence packs and processing logs are as much a part of that as the database is. A file system in ng-1a is in Nigeria, so files on it are in Nigeria. Whether your overall arrangement satisfies the circular is an assessment about your systems and processes, made with your own advisers.
No. Tiering moves a cold file to the Basic class inside the same file system, in the same region, at the same path. It changes the price of holding it and nothing else.
If the file system is in ng-1a and the instances mounting it are in ng-1a, the mount never uses a subsea path, so an event like 14 March 2024 does not reach it. That matters more for a mount than for a page: a slow bucket is a slow response, while a mount across a broken path hangs, and so do the processes waiting on it.
In Naira, by bank transfer or card — the same methods as the rest of your account. Transfer is how most Nigerian business settles anything with an approval behind it; a card suits a small monthly line.
No. It settles in Naira inside Nigeria, by card or bank transfer, so the international spending cap a Nigerian bank sets on a Naira card is untouched by it. A dollar invoice from a provider abroad sits inside that cap every month it renews, and a share that grows takes a wider slice of it every year.
No. Displayed prices exclude VAT. Nigerian VAT on cloud and hosting is 7.5%, administered by the Nigeria Revenue Service, and it is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
Customer references are available under NDA for the products that are live today, object storage in ng-1a among them. Tell [email protected] what you are building and you will be pointed at the closest match.
Shared storage for your whole fleet, almost here
Managed NFS is launching soon, close to your users. Talk to us for early access, and pay in local currency with no card required to start.
Launching soon · 99.99% availability SLA · Billed in NGN