Rocky Linux — deployed in Lagos
Rocky Linux VPS Hosting in Nigeria
Enterprise Linux for the workloads someone else gets to inspect.
Rocky Linux 9 in ng-1a, built to be bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SELinux enforcing from first boot, and free on every plan. In Nigeria this is the distribution under the things that answer to somebody: the core system a vendor certifies, the ledger an auditor reads, the reconciliation database with a retention schedule attached. From NGN 21,950 a month, in Naira.
- Bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
- Ten-year lifecycle per major release — patch, don't migrate
- SELinux enforcing by default, full root over SSH
- Hosted in ng-1a, Lagos — your data stays in Nigeria
- Free on every plan, with no subscription to renew
No credit card required · Billed in NGN
Pricing
Simple plans, billed in your currency
Pay in local currency — no cards, no forex surprises. Every plan is full root, full network, no throttling. Annual billing gets you two months free.
Linux VPS – 2 GB RAM
Small workloads and personal projects.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 4 GB RAM
Web servers and small databases.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 2 vCPU
- 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 8 GB RAM
Production web applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 16 GB RAM
High-traffic applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 8 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 320 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 32 GB RAM
Enterprise applications.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 16 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
- 640 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Linux VPS – 64 GB RAM
Massive workloads and consolidation.
Hosted in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos & Kampala
- 32 vCPU
- 64 GB RAM
- 1280 GB SSD
- 1 Gbps · unlimited local traffic
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- /64 IPv6 included
Prices exclude VAT. Local currency figures are indicative and settled at checkout. Need more cores or memory? Talk to Sales.
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Why Rocky Linux
Why Rocky Linux on Lineserve
Founded by CentOS's original creator after CentOS Linux was discontinued, Rocky rebuilds RHEL for everyone — enterprise-grade Linux with a ten-year lifecycle, free.
- Bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
- The natural home for workloads that used to run on CentOS.
- Ten-year lifecycle per major release — patch, don't migrate.
- The image is free on every plan — you only pay for the server.
Rocky Linux images
Updated regularly
Use cases
What people run on Rocky Linux
CentOS replacements
Move workloads off end-of-life CentOS onto the distro built to take its place.
Enterprise applications
Anything certified or documented for RHEL 9 runs the same here — without the subscription.
Java & backend services
Long-supported base for JVM apps and services that outlive release cycles.
Databases
PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB on NVMe, with SELinux enforcing by default.
SELinux-hardened workloads
Security-first deployments that lean on the RHEL family's hardening story.
Infrastructure services
FreeIPA, monitoring stacks, and the glue services enterprise networks run on.
Data residency
The machine you can point at
Enterprise Linux and regulated data arrive together in Nigeria, and the second one has a date. The Central Bank's circular of 15 June 2026 directs that payment transaction data generated within Nigeria be stored and managed in Nigeria, with full compliance from 1 January 2027, reaching banks, microfinance banks, mobile money operators, fintechs, switching companies, payment service providers and super agents. Underneath the policy language is an infrastructure question with a short answer: which building is the machine in, and in which country. For an instance in ng-1a it is Lagos, and that does not change unless you move it.
That answer has to keep being true for years, which is where the distribution and the region meet. A ten-year lifecycle means the ledger host you build this quarter is the same host, at the same address, through several compliance cycles — patched in place rather than rebuilt somewhere convenient in a hurry. Above the sectoral rules sits the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, whose section 41 sets out the grounds on which personal data may go outside Nigeria: an adequate legal regime, binding corporate rules, contractual clauses, a code of conduct or a certification mechanism, each one something you commission, evidence and keep current. Data held in Lagos never reaches the question.
Where the line sits
The region supplies the location — the instance, its replica, the batch output, the logs with an account reference in every line, and the backups behind them, all created in Lagos and staying there unless you move them. Your own registration with the Commission, your filings and the rest of your architecture stay with you as controller. What hosting here settles is narrower and useful: whether the cross-border question arises for this data at all.
Data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act (NDPA), with your data held in Lagos and not moved out of Nigeria without your instruction.
Who runs Rocky here
Nigerian workloads that came with an opinion about the OS
Nobody picks an enterprise rebuild for fun. It gets picked because a support matrix names Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or because the system is one an auditor, a partner bank or a regulator eventually asks about — and Nigeria has more of those systems per engineer than either market beside it.
Vendor software certified against RHEL
Core banking adjuncts, switching and card-processing components, treasury and ERP modules, telecom and utility billing platforms, the middleware an integrator installed and still supports. Rocky is built from the same sources to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL 9, so the vendor's installer, prerequisites and tuning notes apply unchanged — and when you open a ticket with them, you are on the platform their runbook describes. Without the subscription line in the budget.
Ledgers, reconciliation and settlement
The double-entry ledger, the reconciliation run that has to agree with a partner bank by morning, the settlement job and the files it writes. Fintech is Nigeria's largest startup category and this is its quietest half — long-lived, stateful, unglamorous, and the part that gets examined. A fixed point release with a decade of security updates is what lets the same machine carry that job for years, rather than a base that moves under it every quarter.
Audit archives with a retention schedule
Transaction logs, processing records, timestamped events, the annual extract kept because somebody will eventually ask for it. Retention in Nigerian financial services is measured in years, which makes the operating system a long-term commitment rather than a preference. Storage resizes independently of compute up to 1,280 GB, so the archive grows without the compute bill following.
Public-sector and integrator deployments
Nigerian tenders and technical specifications still name the Red Hat family by default, and an integrator delivering against one needs a platform that matches the document. Rocky meets the specification without a subscription attached to every environment — which matters most in the places nobody budgeted for: the staging box, the training environment, the disaster-recovery copy that has to exist and mostly sits idle.
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
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]FAQ
Questions, answered
Yes — Rocky Linux is built from the same sources to be bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Software documented or certified for RHEL 9 runs identically on Rocky 9.
That's exactly what Rocky was created for, by one of CentOS's original founders. dnf, systemd, SELinux and the file layout all work the way your CentOS runbooks expect.
Rocky Linux 9 is available at deploy time and kept current. You can also bring your own image with a custom ISO.
Yes. All Linux images, Rocky included, are free on every plan — the plan price is the full price of the server.
Yes. Every Rocky Linux VPS gives you complete root access and SSH key authentication from the moment it boots. It's your server to configure however you like.
Yes. Resize to a larger plan as your workload grows, with minimal downtime. Compute and storage scale together across the tiers.
Every plan supports on-demand snapshots and scheduled automated backups. Snapshot storage is billed per GB beyond your included allowance.
In practice, usually yes, because Rocky 9 is built from the same sources to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL 9 and it is where a large share of that vendor's other customers already run. Ask them to name the platform in writing before you build the production instance — it is a five-minute email now and an awkward support ticket later.
It settles the location. 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 an instance in ng-1a puts that data in Nigeria. Whether your full architecture satisfies the directive is a question between you and your regulator — the region supplies the building and the country.
They are close cousins and both are free here. Rocky is the usual answer when something above the OS has an opinion — a vendor support matrix, an auditor, a tender document. AlmaLinux is the usual answer for hosting fleets and anything with cPanel on it, and it has its own page. If neither of those describes you, either will serve.
It is on by default, which is most of the reason teams pick this family in the first place. Vendor software certified for RHEL ships with policies that account for it. For your own applications, the work is the same as it is anywhere in the family — label your data directories correctly and add the ports your services listen on. You have full root, so nothing about the machine is closed to you.
In Naira, by card or bank transfer, settled inside Nigeria. Bank transfer is the usual rail at this size and fits a purchase-order process. Displayed prices exclude VAT; Nigerian VAT is 7.5% and is calculated and shown separately at checkout.
Yes. Your data is hosted in Nigeria and stays in-country, giving you data residency for Nigeria's Data Protection Act (NDPA). It isn't moved out of Nigeria without your instruction.
In our Lagos data centre (ng-1a). Your content is stored and served from Lagos, close to your users.
Pay in Naira by card or bank transfer. No foreign card or forex conversion is required.
You're billed in NGN. Prices can be viewed in USD, KES, TZS, or NGN, but as a Nigeria customer you pay in NGN with no forex conversion.
Deploy your Rocky Linux VPS in under 60 seconds
Full root, running close to your users. Pay in local currency, with no card required to start.
No credit card required · 99.9% uptime SLA · Billed in NGN
Related products
Every plan below runs in the same three regions, on the same network, billed the same way.