[sirl1on]

Treating your server as pet may perfectly fine. Not everything has to be fully automated cloud cluster cattle.

[charcircuit]

Even as a pet I think a proper interface for managing the server would be better and more secure than ssh.

[dspillett]

Often those proper interfaces are wrappers around what you would run via SSH and add their own security holes, so I would argue against “more secure than SSH”.