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.
Did all that, minus the no ssh root login (only key, obviously) plus one failed attempt, fail2ban permaban.
Have not had any issues, ever