I have a dedicated server overseas that I use for hosting various things. It's handy to have something that lives in a remote data centre, separate from all the local goings on. It is, however, as a LAMP stack server, out there on the internet, and folks do "knock on the door" frequently.
I've disabled passworded logins, changed the default SSH port (I know in and of itself, it's not a solution, but it does reduce a lot of the brain dead noise) and firewalled off all but the services which must be accessible externally for the server to function.
I still get hits to the OpenSSH server.