Background: 15 years of experience in software and apparently spoiled because it was already set up correctly.
Been practicing doing my own servers, published a test site and 24 hours later, root was compromised.
Rolled back to the backup before I made it public and now I have a security checklist.
Don’t SSH in as root. Create/use your low-privileged user and add it to the sudo group (with a secure password!), then disable root login for SSH.