I have a few things I disagree with in here and I haven't even gotten all the way through. Generally, most of this is unnecessary, some of it is even ill-advis

I have a few things I disagree with in here and I haven't even gotten all the way through. Generally, most of this is unnecessary, some of it is even ill-advised. The best thing you can do is enable automated updates, and rely on your cloud provider's console for accessing the server and disabling all remote access otherwise. If you do this, you remove a significant amount of vectors of attack. Within AWS there are very good security controls you can put into place, on more generic VPS providers, at minimum you should start by running a firewall that only allows incoming and outgoing traffic on specified ports, and logging in only via key-based auth + 2FA (you can use Google Auth, Yubikey, or others to do this via PAM modules) if you must use SSH. Most of the security issues I've encountered in my career have been in the application, and then are used to provide a pathway to do further privilege escalation. If you work to sandbox your applications, such as using hardened minimal containers w/ appropriate namespacing & sVirt, this mitigates most concerns here. It's been trivially easy to prevent bots spamming basic SSH and HTTP attacks to every IPv4 address for a very long time.