Multisite implementation confusion

I may have been thinking too hard about what I want to do and based on some feedback I have now received can’t understand if I can do it with a Multi-site WP implementation, so am looking for some guidance etc.

A year ago I migrated/converted a small website from a traditional html.index implementation to WP as I wanted to add a Blog. All goes well with it. The WP Blog/Website, we’ll call it https://www.zbq22.co.uk for this discussion is located at a hosting company in the UK.

I have two other small websites https://www.othersite.co.uk & https://www.sleepingsite.co.uk hosted at the same location. These are both small traditional html.index implementations. These domains are classified as sub-domains of my main https://www.zbq22.co.uk, site but the DNS setup is so that a user obviously only sees the correct domain name in the browser address bar when they visit each respective site – why wouldn’t if be like that!

I want to ‘revitalise’ these two sites with a simple redesign (theme) and add a blog and as they are on the same hosted server (in their own directories) as my main site I thought after reading info/watching videos about WP Multi-site that this would be the obvious way to go to consolidate all the ‘sites’ together.

After seeing that there was a choice of subdirectories/sub domains to be made – I would like to stay with sub domains, I wrote to the hosting company who told me that they we only able to support subdirectories under a WP Multi-site implementation as they did not support DNS Wild card records – which I understand is needed for Sub domain based WP Multi-site implementation.

If I go down the Subdirectory route, my current understanding is that the structure will not then reflect what I want the end user to see in the address bar of the user – i.e. each individual site name. Does that mean that I then I have use something like a WP Domain Name Mapping Plug-in to get ‘it’ back to the correct Domain name that the user sees?

An alternate suggestion from the hosting company is that I make two more WP installs in the ‘home’ directory of each of the other websites and build up from there!!!! This suggestion seems completely bonkers to me.

So there we have it, I think I have covered everything, maybe I have read/watched too much info about this. It just seems strange that a simple technical step seems to have got me bogged down with lack of clarity as to what to do next.

As I mentioned at the start of the post any guidance suggestions would be most gratefully received.

Many thanks

Regards

Mike