Music Academy Arabesque Conservatory Delivers a Seamless Digital Experience with Cloudways

About Arabesque Conservatory

Arabesque Conservatory offers world-class music lessons, art lessons, and music therapy for students of all ages and abilities. Personalized in-person lessons are available throughout California, with online instruction extending access to students around the world.

Located in California, USA, Arabesque Conservatory serves communities across Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, and beyond. Its roster of instructors brings formal training from prestigious institutions worldwide, covering instruments, vocal performance, visual arts, cinema, photography, dance, and music production.

Behind the conservatory’s growing digital presence is Michael Dinerstein, CTO, who manages the WordPress infrastructure that powers student enrollment, program discovery, and instructor connections across every location Arabesque Conservatory serves.

As the conservatory expanded its reach and outgrew its original hosting setup, reliable infrastructure became as essential as the instruction itself. Here is how Cloudways helped Arabesque Conservatory keep its digital presence as dependable as its teachers.

Cloudways: For those discovering Arabesque Conservatory for the first time, can you share your story, your mission, and how your website supports students learning music both locally and worldwide?

Michael Dinerstein: Arabesque Conservatory of Music’s mission is to bring music into the lives of people of all ages, with a new and innovative way to learn music. All of our instructors are compassionate and extensively trained, many with degrees from prestigious institutions around the world. They’re here to help students grow in the world of music and beyond.

Arabesque Conservatory is unique in that our programs and adaptive techniques are effective for every student regardless of prior experience, age, or ability. Our instructors work closely with their students to bring the most comfortable and productive experience possible. We also provide art instruction with various mixed mediums and formats.

– Arabesque Conservatory offers lessons in clarinet, drums, violin, voice, guitar, and piano for students of all ages and experience levels. (Source: Arabesque Conservatory)

Cloudways: Before moving to Cloudways, what hosting challenges were you facing, such as slow load times, downtime during enrollments, or technical stress, and how were those issues affecting student registrations or your brand reputation?

Michael Dinerstein: I’ve been working with WordPress since 2014, and am no stranger to the challenges experienced with load times, plugins, managing multiple environments, and testing, etc. I’ve managed many self-hosted and cloud-hosted WordPress installations, none of which were as simple as I’d like.

When I began working with Arabesque Conservatory, they had their public-facing website hosted on Cloudways already, through a contracted web & SEO agency. My first introduction to Cloudways was when I was added to the account and given the opportunity to learn the environment and understand the setup. What I saw was truly impressive. I couldn’t believe how simple – yet powerful – it was.

– The Cloudways platform gives users a clear, real-time view of their servers, applications, and account activity from a single home screen.

Cloudways: When evaluating hosting providers, what specific factors mattered most to you such as performance, scalability, support, or pricing, and what ultimately convinced you that Cloudways was the right long-term partner?

Michael Dinerstein: Even as CTO, I sometimes need to ask for technical support. Support response time is important, especially for emergency situations like a down site, failed backup restoration, and the like. So, response times are important. When I had some questions regarding a migration from one Cloudways server to another, I received chat responses immediately and had my issue sorted in minutes.

More important than support is the quality and reliability of the underlying infrastructure. Being able to choose my preferred cloud hosting provider when spinning up servers with Cloudways is amazing. I can clearly see the price points for each option, and can weigh out the pros & cons. Cloudways isn’t hiding away who supports their services under the hood. That transparency is important to me.

– Arabesque Conservatory serves students across California, with locations spanning Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, and beyond. (Source: Arabesque Conservatory)

Finally, performance and uptime are crucial. Of course, the performance of a WordPress site can be carefully tweaked to a great extent, which could take hours or even days of adjusting, testing, readjusting, retesting… however, I’ve found Cloudways default settings and Breeze cache plugin to be an outstanding default. Rather than fine-tuning cache and minification settings to squash TTFB and LCP times as low as I can, I get to work on other things.

Cloudways: Can you walk us through your onboarding and migration experience to Cloudways? What surprised you most about the process, and how long did it take from the decision to fully live?

Michael Dinerstein: When we outgrew the shared hosting server provided by the web & SEO agency, we decided to migrate to Cloudways. We set up our own account and spun up our own server, then I looked up the steps on how to migrate a WordPress site. I expected pain.

My experience migrating WordPress sites dates back to when we needed to mysqldump, search/replace domains, fix serialized data issues, then restore to a new database… then rsync or zip the contents, SFTP to a new location, and stitch it all back together. Things became a little bit easier when we started using the Duplicator plugin, but we still needed to manually set up the database server, web host, etc. So, I expected pain, initial failure, and some debugging to successfully migrate from one server to another.

However! I installed the Cloudways migration plugin on the source site, entered the destination server info that it requested, and clicked a button. And it worked. First try. No issues. I knew we made the right choice.

Cloudways: Since switching, what measurable improvements have you seen in website speed, uptime, inquiry forms, or student enrollments? Any specific numbers or moments that made you think this decision truly paid off?

Michael Dinerstein: Arabesque Conservatory is growing rapidly. Our traffic and visibility are increasing, and form inquiries are following suit.

– Arabesque Conservatory extends its curriculum beyond music, offering a wide range of arts and performance lessons for students. (Source: Arabesque Conservatory)

Since migrating to our own Cloudways server, we’ve had consistent performance and no downtime. Being confident in our hosting, ability to restore backups in the event of an issue, and managing staging and deployments in a safe manner gives me all the confidence I need to rest assured that we made the right choice.

Cloudways: Which Cloudways features or add-ons, such as backups, security, staging, or Cloudflare CDN, have been most valuable for Arabesque Conservatory?

Michael Dinerstein: I’m a firm believer in backups, and the Cloudways backup system is excellent… And I’m truly impressed with the staging implementation!

The ability to spin up staging environments with a click, each with its own unique settings for testing, domain, GitHub deployment, password protection, etc., is a game-changer. What used to take an afternoon and constant maintenance to set up has become a trivial task. I love it.

– The Cloudways platform gives Michael full control over application access, database management, staging, backups, and deployments from a unified dashboard.

Cloudways: Compared to other hosting providers you have used, what stands out most about Cloudways in terms of reliability, control, transparency, or peace of mind for a growing music academy?

Michael Dinerstein: There’s responsive people running the Cloudways platform. It’s nice to know there are support channels with real people. In an age where human interaction is being offloaded to AI agents, it’s refreshing to connect with a real person. Not only is it possible to reach out, but the option to do it isn’t buried fifteen menus deep in some obscure corner of the platform. It’s just right there.

Cloudways: For other music schools or arts organizations considering Cloudways, what advice would you share based on your journey, especially if they are nervous about migration or scaling their digital presence?

Michael Dinerstein: If you’re nervous about migration or scaling, test it with the smallest instance. Then set up the scaling options and run a performance test against it. You don’t need to go all in and migrate production right away… try it out first. Test the water.

Ready to Deliver a Seamless Digital Experience?

Join thousands of businesses like Arabesque Conservatory that trust Cloudways for reliable hosting, effortless migration, and peace of mind.

Start Free Now