My friends and I have made a cylindrical base centered around a furnace, made of metal plating + armored doors with a floor to shoot out and little murder holes to kill door campers.
We've been building up resources but we try to put them into things that we won't lose easily/would be annoying to raid.
Aside from getting camped by an esp/aimbot hacker with an xbow for about 20 mins until he got bored of shooting our metal walls and left, everything has gone surprisingly well. The only problem is that one clan has c4/aks/rockets 2 days into wipe.
Even if they did waste resources on raiding us, they would get very little, because we try to use up as much as we can on upgrading our building before logging out, so our chests have next to nothing inside.
Rust becomes an entirely different game if you can play with some friends that aren't full on handicaps. It's so much easier. Solo is brutal.