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Adhole.org is shutting down

adhole.org

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Re: Adhole.org is shutting down

#21

Post by float4 »

tw04 wrote: post #17
olivierduval wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually : it's a really nice move to keep this domain up and under control for one year! Moreover, I guess that people relying on this service will soon start to see the errors, go to the website, understand the situation and move on... so 1 year is quite enough I think. It's not like it was a service people use once a year...

Quoted post unavailable.

Oh come on, you can't be that cynical?

The creator started the project 5 years ago because people around him without technical ability wanted a DNS ad blocker, but didn't know how to setup pi-hole. His peak MRR through Patreon was 13$, and he received one or two separate donations of ~10$ every month as well. The servers alone cost him more money than he received.

Dutch source: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/191950/openbare-pi-hole-adhole-v...

Re: Adhole.org is shutting down

#22

Post by ignoramous »

> ...grew out to become a worldwide multi-node adblocking DNS network with thousands of concurrent users around the globe

This is hard because DNS going down means Internet is down for anyone who isn't savvy to check and change a failing DNS upstream. And when your users are global, it might mean some really angry users if you couldn't fix emergent issues for hours on end. I run a public content-blocking DNS stub resolver. We made the decision (and subsequently paid the price upfront in terms of engineering) to host it on Fly.io (DoT), Deno Deploy (DoH), and Cloudflare Workers (DoH) to specifically avoid sysadmin tasks for what's a free offering, and the code is licensed under MPLv2 in case anyone wants to run their own stub resolver on those platforms.

We haven't had much down time, if any at all, in the past one and half years we have been functional. It costs us $1 per 2tps (transactions per second: ~6M requests) for a month. The free-tier of these platforms should cover personal workloads (3 to 5 devices: ~1M requests), just fine.

> I will make sure to keep the domain registered and under my control for the next year, to prevent adhole.org from being abused by DNS hijackers/spoofers.

I think they could, if they want to, transfer the ownership of the domain to another public content-blocking resolver, after a year has passed. There are two or three such providers that have a very solid business backing them up to support such a migration.

Re: Adhole.org is shutting down

#23

Post by dewey »

thealistra wrote: post #5

nextdns.io seems to be similar and I recommend it

Seconded, never had any issues with it. One of these cases where letting someone provide a honest service for money is worth more than fiddling around with self-hosting something myself.

Re: Adhole.org is shutting down

#24

Post by tw04 »

float4 wrote: post #21
tw04 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Oh come on, you can't be that cynical? The creator started the project 5 years ago because people around him without technical ability wanted a DNS ad blocker, but didn't know how to setup pi-hole. His peak MRR through Patreon was 13$, and he received one or two separate donations of ~10$ every month as well. The servers alone cost him more money than he received. Dutch source: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/191950/open…

No post body was provided.

Re: Adhole.org is shutting down

#25

Post by olivierduval »

tw04 wrote: post #17
olivierduval wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually : it's a really nice move to keep this domain up and under control for one year! Moreover, I guess that people relying on this service will soon start to see the errors, go to the website, understand the situation and move on... so 1 year is quite enough I think. It's not like it was a service people use once a year...

Quoted post unavailable.

I think that it would be more efficient to do so NOW, when a lot of people rely on his product, than in 1 year, when most people will have found something else...

As this product will stop working, people will move on quite fastly

I think it's just responsible. And maybe he dosen't want to be the one that allowed triggering a lot of porn ads on people that trusted him (and his domain) to avoid ads

Re: Adhole.org is shutting down

#26

Post by gnud »

tw04 wrote: post #17
olivierduval wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually : it's a really nice move to keep this domain up and under control for one year! Moreover, I guess that people relying on this service will soon start to see the errors, go to the website, understand the situation and move on... so 1 year is quite enough I think. It's not like it was a service people use once a year...

Quoted post unavailable.

But how can he know which steward to trust? If you want to be sure your users won't get sold out, best to simply shut down.

Re: Adhole.org is shutting down

#27

Post by aulin »

tw04 wrote: post #24
float4 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, you can't be that cynical? The creator started the project 5 years ago because people around him without technical ability wanted a DNS ad blocker, but didn't know how to setup pi-hole. His peak MRR through Patreon was 13$, and he received one or two separate donations of ~10$ every month as well. The servers alone cost him more money than he received. Dutch source: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/191950/open…

Quoted post unavailable.

where did he say he's not willing to sell or let a steward step in for domain maintainance costs?

Re: Adhole.org is shutting down

#28

Post by gunapologist99 »

rplnt wrote: post #7
KronisLV wrote: post #2

> ...grew out to become a worldwide multi-node adblocking DNS network with thousands of concurrent users around the globe… but that also meant more server load, which meant upgrading servers, more incident (reports) and as such more work. In other words; the project has become a victim of its own success. Isn't this a problem that most hobbyist projects that get big have to deal with in some capacity? To me it seems…

> donating/selling the entire project to some company or foundation It's not 100% clean service - you are arbitrarily blocking access to certain resources, so I would guess companies wouldn't want to be associated with it. > having a business around it For a service like this, it could pose a major breach in trust for its users. Maybe there's a business that doesn't involve changes in the DNS that I don't see.

but people sign up voluntarily, right? So the users are actually the ones arbitrarily blocking their own access.

Re: Adhole.org is shutting down

#30

Post by selfhoster11 »

KronisLV wrote: post #20
selfhoster11 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really depends on your stack. A plain LTS Linux distro + bind9 + zonefile formatted blocking data + security auto updates is pretty hands off to me.

That's funny, because it's not unheard of for even simple unattended updates to break something, for example: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/debian-and-... (the tone of that blog post of mine is a bit vitriolic and the advice isn't exactly serious, but the fact of the matter is that sooner or later things will break)

OK, fair enough. I guess you can minimally complicate this by updating an exactly identical machine/boot drive first, and then immediately alerting if health checks fail on that. But it really doesn't seem that bad to me. I've run a VPS that's been self-updating continuously since Feb 2019, and I've not had many breaking issues with the OS.
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