Hey all! First, thanks for reading my long-winded post. If I’m asking in the wrong place, direct me to the right spot and I’ll be happy to do so.
Here’s my issue:
I’m a journalist wearing many hats as a one-man band of content creation. I have two news sites, a sports site, a personal site and a corporate site. All WordPress. Four of the five are offshoots of work I started in 2020, and have been through some iterations of getting better since. Various levels of success since due to, well… Being a one-man band and not being an expert except writing in any one field.
My five sites are spread between Bluehost (original host,) a linode 2c/4g shared server, and a 1c/1g shared server. The hosting bill for Bluehost comes due in March. I’d prefer not to drop the cash on it again if I can help it and consolidate everything to one server, and increase the resources as-needed.
Traffic volume has gotten up to 60k users a month before on my primary site, but has stabilized a bit since I put subscriptions in place. Call it around 30k a month for users combined visit my sites, one of those being the primary driver. My goal is to get those figures well up before 2023 ends.
Three of five sites require paid subscriptions to read content, fourth on the 1c/1g is going to move to that plan as soon as I figure out this problem.
My question is the following: how should I go about consolidating down to one server to maintain and maybe even one WordPress instance? Should I?
I’d like to be able to have an automated system in place for local advertisers to upload/build, schedule and pay for the ads without my interference to one or all of the sites. I’d love to have a consolidated user base for various reasons, and have just one backup to make for database and files. Especially since I have plans for putting together an off-site backup to get me back up should anything happen after I messed up badly around Christmas doing updates on linode command line and brought my best performing site down for several days. (I’m going to setup a web interface for doing server maintenance with this consolidation and avoid this in the future.)
I can figure out the server, no issues there and don’t mind using the linode shared plan (thinking of starting on the lowest tier of their dedicated servers even – 2c/4g 80gb hd space, basically the same as what I’m paying for just $10 more than the shared plan I’m on now.)
On three of the sites I have Newspack (the download yourself version) for some of the features (pma app, for instance) and their basic theme. I’m using adrotate for local ads, and wp simple membership to serve paid subscriptions, with various settings involved for displaying content based on each site and what content I’m allowing for free vs. paid. PayPal does the payment processing.
The corporate site is using a customized version of blockbase, is very basic.
My personal subscriber site is using spaceblock currently, not exactly my favorite but works for the moment. Wp simple membership to service subscribers, PayPal processing.
Should I look at turning on multisite and consolidate to one WordPress install? Should I keep things separate? I have googled and not come up with a great way to do this, and am banging my head against the wall fighting php issues with the smaller linode install.
Thanks for any advice in advance!
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