[thefreeman]

The entire point of everyone who rants against non standard ssh ports is that it adds more noise to the signal of "You should disable password login entirely and only use public / private key authentication."

And reading many of the responses in this thread it makes sense to me. So many people in this thread talking about how many less failed password login attempts they get when they change the port, indicating they allow password based login in the first place.

[GekkePrutser]

Even with key auth only, which I have, you're still getting many attempts, wasting CPU cycles.

Most scans are smart enough to give up as soon as they see publickey as the only method, but some keep trying to connect hundreds of times.