Rule of thumb in dealing with domain and hosting vendors - always gauge how educated their support staff is. They should be at least slightly more educated than the average developer who admins their own stuff. And do judge based on website design - if their design looks like it'd would also be appropriate for selling quick ways to lose fat, you should know to stay away.
lxc was rather new when I started looking into this stuff. Since jails were much older, I just went with FreeBSD. Also because I was a little biased against Linux because on my personal computers Ubuntu and Fedora had crashed occasionally.
Now I think lxd is supposed to be a better user experience than lxc. Same backend better frontend. Like ezjail or iocage for FreeBSD makes the management easier than doing it all directly.
It might be slightly easier to use sshguard instead of fail2ban for protecting against ssh attacks.
Using passwordless (key only) login is a given.
As soon as your server is provisioned, log in with the password, first setup ssh, and disable password login.
You can use fail2ban jails for different services (like nginx). You need to decide how strict you need to be.
On FreeBSD, using blacklistd might also be a better idea than using fail2ban.
To quote from the internet - "fail2ban and sshguard are both log scrapers. Log scrapers are gross hacks.
blacklistd as an integrated solution is what should have
happened many years ago."
FreeBSD jails also provide excellent protection. It can be a good idea to run each service in its own jail. E.g. a separate jail for nginx, one for your webserver, another for your db servers. This way you can also limit the resources that are allocated/dedicated to each jail.
Also, while running pf (or whatever firewall you have), you can limit the number of requests (rate limiting) to somewhat protect yourself.
Using Cloudflare or something else on the front can help against ddos. Also, some providers like OVH and Hetzner have ddos protection built in for free. Some like Vultr have it as a paid service, iirc.
Yeah, I was a bit disappointed to see Donald Trump dragged into this, almost arbitrarily, and almost needlessly. Then I remembered I was afterall reading the Vox.
1. There's a lot more than deep learning and genome editing. But yes, you're right, these are part of the cutting edge. You should look around further. And beyond pure technology too.
2. Script hacking is different from things like deep learning or genome sequencing. The former requires knowledge of a programming language and some talent. The latter requires a great deal of subject knowledge in addition. So yes, going back to school is a good way to start learning these things in a structured manner.
3. One option, if you are a big picture guy with tech skills, is to build your own product. You should have the vision and the skills. The other, like I said before, look beyond pure tech, there's a lot starting to happen. Third, like you said, go to school and learn machine learning or genetic engineering.
Surely, you're not suggesting invading a nuclear power to seize their natural assets.