hietsu
Nice, but the bots may not understand the joke.
And not only that but they will tag the domain with ”there is something here”, and maybe some day someone will take a closer look and see if you are all up-to-date or would there maybe be a way in. So better to just drop everything and maybe also ban the IP if they happen to try poke some commonly scanned things (like /wp-admin, /git, port 22 etc.) GoAccess is a pretty nice tool to show you what they are after.
Not at hand no, but I’m sure any of the LLMs can guide you through the setup if googling does not give anything good.
Nothing very special about all this, well maybe the subdir does require some extra spells to reverse proxy config.
Use a reverse proxy (caddy or nginx proxy manager) with a subdomain, like myservice.mydomain.com (maybe even configure a subdir too, so …domain.com/guessthis/). Don’t put anything on the main domain / root dir / the IP address.
If you’re still unsure setup Knockd to whitelist only IP addresses that touch certain one or two random ports first.
So security through obscurity :) But good luck for the bots to figure all that out.
VPN is of course the actually secure option, I’d vote for Tailscale.
UTM is the way to go on modern Macs, and even iOS/iPadOS too! Free, built on QEMU and super easy to spin up virtual machines with any architecture.