Is Multisite for me?

I am trying to see which route would be best for me to go with long term – multiple installs of WordPress or a Multisite Install.

I am migrating my website right now from an old fashioned made mostly in a text editor to WordPress. I have some experience running my own wordpress sites, but nothing multisite before.

The website is for an annual event that takes place, so there will be yearly versions of the website created. I have the old version from 2016 put onto the webhost currently.

Right now, the old site is just located in /home/username/public_html/

What I’d like to do is likely install wordpress into /home/username/public_html/wordpress/ so it won’t take down the current version of the site as I get everything configured.

Ideally, I’d like to have a version for each year (so – either installing WP each year into it’s own subfolder by year… or maybe exploring multisite).

I can have past year’s accessible on the internet possibly through http://www.domainname.com/2016 or http://domainname.com/2016, but ultimately, I’d want http://www.domainname.com & http://domainname.com to be going to the most recent version of the site (in this case right now, the 2017 version).

Any suggestions you can provide me / guidance / which way I should be looking to go?