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I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS

mattsayar.com

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Re: I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS

#21

Post by CharlesW »

MattSteelblade wrote: post #8

This is, almost verbatim, my exact same experience. Used pi-hole as an excuse to get a Raspberry Pi. Used it for a long time but got tired of troubleshooting. Discovered NextDNS (from this site), and have been a happy customer since. NextDNS has not been perfect (it looks like they abandoned their app(s)), but it has the added benefit of working outside of my home network.

Regarding the client apps, I find them to be mostly not neccessary now that you can identify clients to DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS endpoints. What do you miss?

Re: I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS

#23

Post by stego-tech »

djaychela wrote: post #9

Have to say I've never had a single issue with pihole unlike the OP. It's literally been "install and forget" - not a single outage in maybe 3 years of use. When I use the Internet elsewhere I see what a good job it does when I'm at home...

Same. The only outages I had were self-caused due to my (at the time) inexperience with Linux and the hardware of the RPi it was running on - namely the lack of RTC support and my unfamiliarity with fallback methods for Linux that didn't rely on HTTPS for NTP. My own fault, really, but an amazing learning experience.

Since then, it's trucked along without issue for years. Couldn't use the internet without it at this point.

Re: I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS

#24

Post by willwade »

Does anyone out there have a working Apple Shortcut that can toggle on/off a denied domain like YouTube? That's one feature I had in Pihole that I can't seem to replicate.

Update.. as usual I was trying this all day and only after posting this does this work - Here's a bash script https://gist.github.com/willwade/251fa791da27267b5470c75a7b5... - a shortcut for this is way more complicated

Re: I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS

#25

Post by sambaumann »

djaychela wrote: post #9

Have to say I've never had a single issue with pihole unlike the OP. It's literally been "install and forget" - not a single outage in maybe 3 years of use. When I use the Internet elsewhere I see what a good job it does when I'm at home...

I have my cell phone routed to my pi hole for DNS even when I'm not at home using tailscale. It's a great experience

Re: I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS

#26

Post by sambaumann »

dewey wrote: post #22

Have been using it for a long time, never have any issues and you can even use it via Tailscale which is nice: https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns

I use my pihole for tailscale too without issue - just have a tailscale node on my home network and point the tailscale DNS settings to the pi-hole's IP

Re: I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS

#27

Post by g_host »

It is understandable that one would be frustrated with a Raspberry Pi handling critical network services like DNS.

I've been running pi-hole in KVM guest virtual machines for more years than I can remember and never had any problems. I would expect a Raspberry Pi to eventually choke on the demand of providing 24/7 service to a network.

But not everyone has a hypervisor in their basement. Forking over $20/year is definitely better on the budget than buying a server.

But if you already have a server or some reliable hardware in your LAN, there's no good reason to leave anything important up to a Raspberry Pi.

Re: I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS

#28

Post by dmd »

I switched from NextDNS to ControlD because of bugs and feature requests that have been sitting untouched for literally years.

I couldn’t even reach anyone to cancel my NextDNS subscription, so I did a chargeback - which went through because the card company was also unable to reach anyone there. It seems to be running in zombie mode.

Re: I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS

#29

Post by MattSayar »

toywinder wrote: post #20
MattSayar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that's because of the hardware you're running it on? Do you actually use a Raspberry Pi or something more resilient?

I have been running pi-hole on a raspberry for years with no downtime, op is either pitching for the DNS provider or they have not deployed their pi-hole correctly.

My only financial relationship with NextDNS is the $40 I've spent on the service so far. Another comment mentioned turning off query logging since that amount of activity is hard on an SD card, so you may be onto something with deploying it incorrectly
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