That sounds about right, but there are a couple of points to make your life a bit easier. (Maybe, and I am sure some of the elders
will give you better advice)
You can have more that 9 recips on a free site, look around and if you use custom text recips you can have 20 or more recips on one table. (Cuts down on the number of mirrors you make)
Create a html file with your recip tables (one for every niche) and then is just a matter of copy paste for new sites.
Copying the free site to a new folder, I hope you only copy the html files, the thumbs and content can just stay in one folder (just update the links for the mirrors)
I hope that helps some, and welcome to the board (you found agreat place to learn). Good Luck!