I’m not sure that the alternatives were any better, everything was terrible back then.

Clever, the bacteria gets lost in the maze and slowly goes insane and starves to death.

Most cloud providers have some kind of firewall that allows to configure a resource being accessible only from certain IP addresses. Worth it to set to your home IP address, as long as it’s static.

Tbh there also was iPod Touch, which did everything iPhone did except making calls.