FOURTH AVENEW, an Accra-based boutique agency connecting African creative talent to global opportunities, runs almost entirely on email and its blog. When its previous host let outbound email fail for two weeks and then spent three days blaming the customer, founder Ato Kilson moved to hosting.com. Since June, the site hasn't gone down once, emails deliver very fast, and support has been fast enough to feel proactive rather than reactive.
Website: fourthavenew.net
Industry: Creative agency (PR, marketing, talent representation, and video production for African creatives)
Headquarters: Accra, Ghana
Background:
Ato Kilson started out as a music producer in Ghana. Producing led to PR and marketing for the artists he worked with, and PR led to an idea: an agency built around the things he already loved doing. He founded FOURTH AVENEW in 2021 and started operating in February 2022, initially serving musicians, then expanding into fashion, film, and visual arts as the work found him.
Today FOURTH AVENEW describes its mission as connecting African talent to global opportunities. It runs a blog covering the creative industry across Africa and the diaspora, represents talent (including Ghanaian dance creator Lisa Quama, whose four-city tour the agency powered in August before heading to New York Fashion Week and Climate Week in September), and produces campaign and ad video for brands. Employee number one, as Ato puts it, is Ato. Writers, videographers, photographers, and editors come in project by project.
That means two things are non-negotiable for the business. The blog has to stay up, because that's where the audience and the credibility live. And email has to work, because pitches, cold outreach, and inbound opportunities all flow through it.
Challenge & Requirements:
Email That Wasn't Being Delivered
FOURTH AVENEW's first host, a local Ghanaian provider a friend recommended in 2022, hosted both the website and the agency's email. The email side was unreliable from the start, with messages bouncing or sitting in a queue for hours. In June 2026, after a month away in the UK on tour, Ato came back to a backlog of stories to publish and a new talent to sign, started sending outreach, and heard nothing back. Checking the delivery logs in cPanel, he found every email sent in the previous two weeks had bounced.
Support That Blamed the Customer
There was no phone number to call. Tickets went back and forth for three full days, with the provider's first response being that the problem was on Ato's end. A migration quote of five working days for something he felt should take hours was the final straw.
A Business With No Margin for Silence
The agency's model depends on outreach landing and stories publishing on time. Two weeks of undelivered email, during a period when the World Cup and a new signing were both in play, wasn't just an inconvenience. It put opportunities at risk.
FOURTH AVENEW was looking for:
Reliable email delivery and site uptime, above everything else
Support that responds quickly and treats problems as problems to solve, not to assign blame for
Affordability, since the switch was made on short notice rather than planned into a budget
The Solution:
On the same friend's advice, Ato moved FOURTH AVENEW to hosting.com in June 2026. He runs the agency on a cPanel Shared Hosting plan.
The difference showed up in the first week. Tickets got instant responses, and support was sometimes proactive, flagging things Ato should do before he'd asked. Compared to a previous host he describes as silent unless he chased them, the contrast was stark.
Impact:
Zero Downtime Since Migrating
The site hasn't gone down since the move in June.
Email That Actually Arrives
Outbound email now delivers very fast. Under the previous host, messages could queue for hours before sending, when they sent at all.
Support That Shows Up First
Fast ticket responses and occasional proactive outreach.
A Founder Who Can Focus on the Work
With hosting and email no longer a recurring problem, Ato's attention is back where he wants it: on talent, on stories, and on building a team that can eventually carry the agency beyond one person.
"The site hasn't been down since June. My emails have also not been bouncing. They actually deliver very fast now."
-Ato Kilson, FOURTH AVENEW
