I had to look up NPM as in my head it's NodeJS Package Manager but TIL there's also Nginx Proxy Manager!
I like your VPN solution for a small group and actually tying it to their home network/router could make sense and further restrict attacks I have to deal with. However in my case I could be dealing with 30+ households of users and as others say I am bound to get people on mobiles complaining they can't access it. However noted for future projects.
Good to hear Anubis is effective - I would hope that takes the site out of the 'easy target' sort of category and most bots give up. Yeah I think monitoring is gonna be key to keep an eye on threats. Thanks!