hi george,
yes, sadly, I had either forgotten about this or never knew about it. I suppose I should have updated here with that info when I finally figured it out a couple of weeks ago. It is, indeed, super simple.
I pay what is, for me, a lot of money for a "managed" host and they did not even mention this. moreover, they were the ones who initially configured the multisite, then they just left me in the lurch and said it was a plugin problem and not a server issue.
needless to say, I will be moving everything over to my own server at digital ocean soon.
thank you for replying, George!