Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mattsayar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 73 posts

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

#31

Post by LinuxBender »

bhaney wrote: post #2

I've just been dumping ad blocking hosts files into /etc/hosts.d/ on my router since long before pi-hole was a thing.

Similar here. I use Unbound DNS plus 1Hosts [1] and a few others here and there and I block all the DoH/DoT servers. I also blackhole route known malicious networks.

[1] - https://github.com/badmojr/1Hosts

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

#33

Post by JadoJodo »

I came to a similar conclusion. I love tinkering and messing with stuff. Those in my household also enjoy (tolerate) my tinkering. What they don't enjoy is when that tinkering impacts them and is unreliable. The amount of time I spent on a monthly basis keeping PiHole working (through updates, list updates, and the random "PiHole just stopped resolving all requests" was laid bare when I paid $19… and didn't ever have to touch it again. The bonus is that I can access it on every device I own, anywhere in the world. I appreciate PiHole and I know there are use-cases for it; I just couldn't go back after trying NextDNS.

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

#34

Post by jdoss »

dmd wrote: post #28

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.

I just learned about ControlD today and It seems their $2/mo per endpoint is pretty pricey. Do you just set it on your home router and that's it? I use my NextDNS with many different profiles and many unique devices. Are the ControlD features that much better?

Edit: I totally missed they have a Personal tab at the top that has different pricing. It is still more expensive for their full control plan.

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

#35

Post by vitaflo »

MattSayar wrote: post #11
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...

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?

For myself I’ve been running pihole on an RPi3 for 7 years and have never had one single issue with it at all. Maybe I’m just lucky I dunno. I’m always surprised when I hear people have issues with it.

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

#36

Post by tomschwiha »

dmd wrote: post #28

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.

For me, I have an option from my user account in Nextdns to cancel the subscription. Didn't that work for you?

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

#37

Post by gerdesj »

g_host wrote: post #27

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 defi…

You can set a Pi to have a read only filesystem on card/stick with an overlay with a RAM based filesystem. Ship logs elsewhere or have a second card/stick.

A Pi can run for a very long time if you are careful. I run my dad's phones with one with Raspbx. It has two USB sticks in it. Both are bootable and the live one copies itself to the other monthly. Its unlikely that both sticks will die at the same time - glacial speed RAID 1!

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

#38

Post by dmd »

tomschwiha wrote: post #36
dmd wrote: post #28

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.

For me, I have an option from my user account in Nextdns to cancel the subscription. Didn't that work for you?

Nope, every time I’d tried to do that I got a 500 error.

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

#39

Post by ddtaylor »

dmd wrote: post #28

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.

Similar experience but I used a Privacy card and just closed it.

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

#40

Post by _DeadFred_ »

dmd wrote: post #28

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.

What feature(s) are you missing? NextDNS is pretty mature, I haven't ran into anything I needed.
Post reply on HN