Can’t believe some of the terrible advice here. Stick with Ubuntu LTS, unless you are willing to pay for RHEL. Do NOT use Fedora or any Arch based distro, thos

Can’t believe some of the terrible advice here. Stick with Ubuntu LTS, unless you are willing to pay for RHEL. Do NOT use Fedora or any Arch based distro, those have way too aggressive releases to be considered for any type of server (they are fine desktop or lab distros but I would never consider them for legit servers). Ideally have a firewall (or security group if in AWS, etc) that sits in front of your server. Make sure only the absolute necessary ports are open (white list by ip if you can). Extra credit have Wire Guard server that you connect to and only allow ssh through that. If you are the only person accessing a shell on the machine then make sure shh allows keys only, and make sure you private key has a pass phrase on it. Extra credit, use jump cloud (free if you have under 5 users), and it’s super easy to enforce 2FA with ssh. If you have several people that need to ssh then use a short lived certificate solution like Teleport.