You understand the risks, but it's also a bad idea because it's effectively security-by-obscurity. I can port scan your host and find your SSH port in just a fe

You understand the risks, but it's also a bad idea because it's effectively security-by-obscurity. I can port scan your host and find your SSH port in just a few minutes. Port knocking is better but still not foolproof unless you're doing some crazy 12-port sequence... And not having hordes of chinese bots hammering on our SSH port makes us slip up and do silly things like leaving password auth enabled. There's no harm in having connection attempts on your ssh port. Changing your port will not make you more secure against a dedicated attacker, and you just make things harder for yourself (and marginally less secure, for the reasons you mentioned) with no real benefit. And like I mentioned in the other comment, just use SSH keys and disable password auth. It's not hard, and it's all it takes to thwart every bot that hits you on port 22. If you want to be more hardcore you can run fail2ban or firewall the port down to your country or whatever. It's the equivalent of "I connect to my host via IP address instead of having DNS records because it'll be harder for them to find!".