Help needed? Moving a boat load of websites

[Deborah]

I’ve been lucky. When you start a digital company you try to build a list of clients, some need help this month, some next month, some ongoing – and so you get new opportunities for growth and revenue. A local competitor is leaving the industry and shacking up with one of his bigger clients, taking his whole team too. We’ve negotiated a deal where, instead of leaving clients to their own devices he’s going to do a nice handover – of about 120 client websites. He wants them off his servers, gone completely (some have asked if he could help remove them and set them up elsewhere but he’s said no as he doesn’t want the phone calls in the future to help with something they don’t understand). We’re getting the opportunity to take ALL of them (apart from friends/family and his current client). Many are run on wordpress multisite, all are through amazon servers and lightsail (which I don’t use, or know much about). Most are small local businesses, the butcher, baker, candlestick maker – needing little more than hosted and updated, a once a year freshen of pages, and a tart up reskin/theme every few years, there’s a few ecommerce (missoin critical sites, but a handful at most). He runs them all on multisite, but says this is probably what is slowing a few of them down – too many plugins, not needed for all sites. He said, if he could do it again he probably wouldn’t run them all on multisite, but individually! (hmmm…!?!?). I’m looking for advice on what you would do if handed this opportunity… some say perhaps run some on multisite, get the benefit of one touch updates for all, and leave the complicated ones individually and ecommerce ones that need more sophisticated plug ins. I’m looking for all and any ideas on what you would do if this was you. From the start. Do I get a dedicated server for them, do I just use VPS (or something else). Does anyone recommend Amazon servers above others? WWYD. If it’s worth it, he;s also handing us a server of 60-70 very old (2010-2012… pre-wordpress) sites, that also represent an opportunity to grow and re-sell to them in the very near future. – by hq overview k_rocker – –