"I'm actually not brave enough to open a few public ports on a server I own and manage and drive traffic there. It's a mix between "scared" and "it only took an hour to set up the entire thing the easy way.""

I love port knocking for this reason. You can take a baby step between not opening a port at all and opening it wide to the world ... for now, just open it up to yourself.

My sshd and personal HTTPS wiki are hiding behind knockd. I like the idea that they are simply invisible to the rest of the Internet.