[pmoriarty]

But the fewer people "test" it, apart from me, the better.

This is akin to putting your email address all over the internet. If you do that, you're going to get lots of spam. If you are more careful about who you give it to, you'll get less.

It's clearly a win to keep both email addresses and ssh server addresses as private as possible.

[semi-extrinsic]

The difference between IP and email adresses is that one is trivially enumerated, the other is not.

Any internet-facing server that responds on port 22 will get several (up to hundreds) of failed login attempts per day. Just install something like fail2ban and watch your logs.

[dicknuckle]

When was the last time you looked at your SSH logs for public machines? Your public IP is just that, public. Anyone can scan it, and it most certainly gets hit by many scanners a day.