I sorta understand why data caps were implemented in the past. Some people hosted servers on their home connection, and their total internet traffic in a week would far exceed that of a normal user’s. Data caps were meant to force people to be conservative on their internet usage so this would not happen.
But come on now, it’s 2023. If your internet infrastructure could not handle that amount of traffic, you are a laughing stock of ISPs.
It’s not necessary to firewall every device. Just like how your router can handle NAT, it should be able to handle stateful firewall too.
Mine blocks all incoming connections by default. I can add (IP, port range) entries to the whitelist if I need to host a service, it’s not really different to NAT port forwarding rules.
I use a pi for servers because of the assumption that it uses very little power to run (compared to say, an old unused laptop), is that not the case?
Overall everyone will use less data when there’s a data cap, I found.
My ISP implemented data caps back then too (thankfully it’s all removed now, but 60GB was really bonkers!) and I just find it fascinating how much traffic I generate nowadays, when I don’t have to care how much data I have left this month.
Anyways, data caps shouldn’t be relevant anymore in 2023 when absolutely everything can handle gigabits and more. It’s interesting how American ISPs still implement them.