> my $1/month VPS can handle the traffic without a problem, so I see no need to ban or rate limit any IPs, especially since I hate captchas with a passion.
I run a company that routinely scrapes government run, public domain websites. Sadly, many of these sites come with captchas. We can easily bypass these captchas by paying roughly $1.50/1000 captchas, but when scraping millions of pages a month, these costs become significant.
As far as I can tell, adding a captcha to a site does nothing to prevent bots, it just alters the economics of any business that relies on the data. I understand that bots can potentially slow down servers and cause disruptions for human users, but for the handful of government agencies that actually talk to us, we happily restrict scraping to certain hours of the day or limit overall traffic to a reasonable level. I would go further and happily give the money we're spending on solving captchas back to the government so they can upgrade their servers and make the system better for everyone.
For those that are conducting nefarious activities, captchas likely do nothing. For individuals, they are annoying. For legitimate scraping companies, they are a needless expense. Captchas are pretty obsolete.