[jimsheldon]

Post author here.

SSH access is absolutely a last resort, but can be necessary in certain cases (like when Filebeat breaks...). Turning SSH off completely (i.e. "No SSH") is certainly better for security and something we may pursue.

I mentioned in another comment here that SSH is just one example, we can also easily hit endpoints with curl via hostname.

Also mentioned in the post are other tools (like Grafana dashboards) have an expectation of unique hostnames.