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Why I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads

[me-removebg-preview] Matt Sayar February 19, 2025
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I love the idea behind the Pi-hole: block ads at the DNS layer so ads
never even reach your devices. No ads, no trackers, and no worries
about your extensions breaking! Works network-wide! Unfortunately, it
caused me more grief than joy.

I love most things about the Pi-hole. It gave me a great excuse to
buy a Raspberry Pi. Onboarding was easy to follow with simple
command-line installation that still makes you feel like HackerMan.
The UI is so intuitive, simple, and has great dashboards. It was a
fun project!

Pie Hole dashboard - Source pi-hole.net

So what was the problem?

Sometimes it just wouldn't work, and it wasn't obvious that the
Pi-hole was the culprit. The internet would just hang sometimes, and
me and my family members would restart our phones/TVs/laptops, reboot
the WiFi, etc. If that didn't work, I had to futz with the Pi-hole. 

I would log in to the Pi-hole, see if the UI shows any errors, google
them, and do whatever some guy on a forum says to fix it. Sometimes
I'd need to SSH into the Pi-hole, check the logs, google those, or
maybe do a software update. Often, just rebooting the Raspberry Pi
fixed it, at least temporarily.

If I wasn't home when it went down, people just suffered until I came
back. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the Hero's Welcome when I
arrived, but I would prefer things to just work.

[dns]This haiku is funny to people who were never on call for IT Ops

There has to be a better way!

Eventually I discovered NextDNS. It's basically a SaaS Pi-hole, with
no downtime or troubleshooting! AdGuard also has a competing product.
I value my precious free time, but how much was I willing to pay in
order to never troubleshoot my Pi-hole again? Let's check the
pricing...

[SCR-20250131-qcbj]

At $20 per year, that's what I call, and I don't say this lightly: a
no-brainer. One troubleshooting session with my Pi-hole could take
15-30 minutes from discovery to resolution, and I would troubleshoot
it 10-12 times a year. That's hours per year of frustration I could
wipe out for only $20? I'm all in.

[SCR-20250131-qlhp]

You still get all the nice dashboards, the logging, blocking/
unblocking sites as needed, etc. The biggest bonus is ad-blocking on
your phone. Just add your personalized domain to your device's
"Private DNS" setting.

[private_dns]

Wow I'm sold

I can't say enough good things about it. I picked NextDNS because I
saw it before AdGuard. Is it better than AdGuard? No idea. Strangely,
NextDNS even has the option to use AdGuard's blocklists so it
probably doesn't matter?

[SCR-20250202-tdod]Huh, I just realized these are the only blocklists
I use anyway. Too bad for AdGuard, I'm too lazy to switch!

I haven't seen any new features added to NextDNS since I started
using it over a year ago, and for only $20/year I can't imagine
they're making enough money to develop it further. But honestly
that's fine! It's essentially a "finished product," and it's even
somewhat refreshing to see a SaaS company leave something well enough
alone.

This article was updated on February 19, 2025

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Matt Sayar

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