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What about the cost of maintaining the server? I've had poor experiences with maintaining my own VPS in the past. Basic advice is setup fail2ban and I'm unable to ascertain if that's adequate. We're not all walking around with that knowledge, nor do I know how to easily acquire it.

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Either go with a hosted solution or take the time to learn linux server admin. Linux hasn't changed much in the past 15 years, and I don't think it will change much in the coming years either. With web stuff you have to keep up with new developments, but linux is very stable and boring by comparison. There's a learning curve, but taking the time to understand how linux really works is totally worth it.

You'll want to follow some linux hardening guides, set up a firewall, set up fail2ban, set up full disk encryption, backups, and some other things.

The parent suggestion of just running git over SSH has a small attack surface, its not like HTTP accepting anyone through the front door. Set `PasswordAuthentication no` in `/etc/ssh/sshd_config` and I don't think you even need fail2ban. But you could put a rate limit on new connections to port 22, or leave the fail2ban setup as an additional guard, and of course you want to block all the other ports you don't need.

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