Reminds me that I wanted to expose an old T.A.G. BBS to the web as a nostalgia project recently. Feel free to check it out, create an account, play some LORD, Trade Wars 2002, Usurper, Messages, etc. I just wanted the experience to live on as I remember it with nothing more than a modern web browser required. https://nightwatchbbs.com

exactly what I first thought...by the stopwatch their not

Sounds like a you problem I've had multiple FreeBSD systems on vultr for over a decade and never had sshd issues. Of course I also use an alternate port and active fail2ban to block those who insist on any brute force for any protocol. 128K active blocks currently.

Have been using vultr with very good stability for BSD systems since 2015 or so, highly recommend.