[HN Gopher] I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS
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I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS
Author : MattSayar
Score : 50 points
Date : 2025-02-19 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mattsayar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mattsayar.com)
| bhaney wrote:
| I've just been dumping ad blocking hosts files into /etc/hosts.d/
| on my router since long before pi-hole was a thing.
| MattSayar wrote:
| How do you keep them updated?
| bhaney wrote:
| curl in a cronjob
| vwadhwani wrote:
| Works great for PCs, but my pi-hole doubles as a VPN and lets
| me block ads on my iPhone too.
| doubled112 wrote:
| My router supports DNS blocklists and VPN too.
| bhaney wrote:
| > my pi-hole doubles as a VPN
|
| So does any non-trash router.
| ahepp wrote:
| I find pi-hole fascinating since it shows there is a sizeable
| market for open Linux routers in the home, but for some reason
| people seem fixated with running it on a raspberry pi. That's
| fine, but it seems like the worst of all worlds? I wouldn't say
| the Pi is particularly reliable, and it doesn't have a switch
| chip inside it, or enough beef for heavier processing.
|
| It's all just standard *nix software that will work on anything
| from my SFP module running openwrt, to a reflashed MIPS
| Ubiquiti router, to my x86 FreeBSD box.
| ahepp wrote:
| In classic HN fashion I forgot to mention that the nice web
| UI must play a key role here, and make up for all the other
| UX issues that come with using a pi rather than just "apt-get
| dnsmasq"
| gh02t wrote:
| Pi Hole was started specifically as a project targeting the
| Pi. It wasn't the first to do ad blocking DNS by a long shot,
| but it did marry a nice web UI to DNS and made it a lot more
| accessible. Nowadays I think there are much better options
| like AdGuard that do the same thing, but "running PiHole on a
| Pi" as a tangible thing to do with the RasPi you got as a
| gift is an approachable project for a lot of Linux beginners
| with tangible benefit. Lot of people who are interested in
| tech but not so skilled probably don't have dedicated servers
| or know how to set one up, and I expect PiHole on a RasPi
| gets a lot of momentum from that as something cool and
| actually useful to do.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| 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
| mihaaly wrote:
| Is this a paid article (ad)?
| MattSayar wrote:
| No, I just wanted to put everything in the title so it didn't
| sound like clickbait. I laid out my experience with Pi-hole and
| why I chose a different service instead
| bherrmann7 wrote:
| Thanks Matt
| neilv wrote:
| Some of the language does sound like they're pitching a gizmo
| on TV, to separate retirees from their money. But still within
| the range of how genuine people sound enthusiastic when they've
| found a lifehack.
| MattSteelblade wrote:
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| 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?
| MattSteelblade wrote:
| Being able to disable it on the fly is the number one thing I
| miss the most. Additionally, it would be nice to interface
| through the app instead of the website, but that's definitely
| under nice-to-have; the website is functional on a mobile
| device.
| djaychela wrote:
| 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...
| MattSayar wrote:
| 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?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| I just run it in a Docker container on my NUC that i upgrade
| occasionally, no issues for years.
| djaychela wrote:
| It's running on my home server which is a low powered celeron
| J3120 (I think) on Ubuntu LTS , so possibly that may make a
| difference, although I've used pis in long term always on
| other applications and they've been fine but perhaps pihole
| may be too much for a pi.
| toywinder wrote:
| 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.
| MattSayar wrote:
| 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
| vitaflo wrote:
| 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Been running my PiHole on a ZeroPi[1] for many years without
| issues. Initially it was unstable, but turned out I had been
| scammed and the USB "charging cable" I had bought at the
| local electronics store had 1 Ohm resistance. Replaced it
| with a proper USB cable and it's been rock solid since. So
| solid I keep forgetting about it in fact.
|
| [1]: https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/pro
| duct...
| mfro wrote:
| I have also had 0 issues with pihole, but switched to
| technitium for the extra features. Only issues I have had were
| related to the SD card. Turned off query logging and 0 issues
| since. SD cards are an awful place to run an OS from.
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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.
| sambaumann wrote:
| 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
| jaymzcampbell wrote:
| I had very similar sounding issues to the OP and thought it's
| probably something to do with a suboptimal SD card and/or
| overheating or memory. I also ended up using NextDNS and tbf
| really like it. Does a great job at a decent price and the
| admin is useful. I keep thinking I should just setup another
| pihole but NextDNS are at a very, very sweet price point that
| by the time I renew (tbf I think I fit within the free tier but
| wanted to support it), I just throw them another 20eur.
| zenethian wrote:
| Mine craps out every 2-3 months for no apparent reason. It
| doesn't crash, there's no errors in the logs, it just stops
| responding. I restart the service and it's fine. No idea why. I
| setup a cron to restart it weekly just to keep it from being a
| problem.
| CharlesW wrote:
| I'm also a very happy NextDNS user. A couple other thoughts for
| anyone considering this:
|
| * The free plan supports 300,000 queries/month (all features,
| unlimited devices, unlimited configurations) and is a great and
| simple way to test drive it.
|
| * If you like the _idea_ but want more knobs, many people are
| also happy with competitor Control D. I 'd just caution that the
| two-year-old comparison1 on their site is just wrong about
| several claims (including "lower latency") and is not without
| problems itself2. I looked at them and chose NextDNS as a better
| "set and forget" option that also plays well with Tailscale3.
|
| 1 https://controld.com/blog/control-d-vs-nextdns/ 2
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlD/comments/1irgehp/178ms_lat... 3
| https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns
| wrboyce wrote:
| I'm also a happy Tailscale/NextDNS user, but for what it is
| worth Tailscale integrates with ControlD now too.
|
| https://tailscale.com/kb/1403/control-d
| dewey wrote:
| 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
| sambaumann wrote:
| 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
| willwade wrote:
| 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
| g_host wrote:
| 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.
| gerdesj wrote:
| 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!
| dmd wrote:
| 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.
| jdoss wrote:
| 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.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| https://www.stacksocial.com/sales/control-d-5-year-
| subscript...
|
| ControlD over NextDNS - one is on zombie mode it seems, the
| other isnt...
| tomschwiha wrote:
| For me, I have an option from my user account in Nextdns to
| cancel the subscription. Didn't that work for you?
| dmd wrote:
| Nope, every time I'd tried to do that I got a 500 error.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Similar experience but I used a Privacy card and just closed
| it.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| What feature(s) are you missing? NextDNS is pretty mature, I
| haven't ran into anything I needed.
| system7rocks wrote:
| Wow! I could have written this. PiHole works great... until your
| personal server does something weird or hangs or crashes or power
| flickers.
|
| NextDNS just works. Allowlists are pretty easy to implement too
| for those edge cases.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| 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.
| fuzzy_biscuit wrote:
| This post reads like an ad/marketing copy. Even shows the pricing
| right off the bat.
| damion6 wrote:
| The only issue I had was minor and had to do with updating and
| breaking my system. That was easily solved with one command after
| update so script. That issue was just fixed.
| password4321 wrote:
| Related yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093328
| _Pi-hole v6_
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(page generated 2025-02-19 23:01 UTC)