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'm also a very happy NextDNS user. A couple other thoughts for anyone considering this:<p>• 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.<p>• If you like the <i>idea</i> 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.<p>¹ <a href="https://controld.com/blog/control-d-vs-nextdns/" rel="nofollow">https://controld.com/blog/control-d-vs-nextdns/</a> ² <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlD/comments/1irgehp/178ms_latency_today_why_is_that/mddxx06/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlD/comments/1irgehp/178ms_lat...</a> ³ <a href="https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns" rel="nofollow">https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns</a>
I switched from NextDNS to ControlD because of bugs and feature requests that have been sitting untouched for literally years.<p>I couldn’t even reach anyone to cancel my NextDNS subscription, so I did a chargeback - which went through because the <i>card company</i> was also unable to reach anyone there. It seems to be running in zombie mode.
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.
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.
It is understandable that one would be frustrated with a Raspberry Pi handling critical network services like DNS.<p>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.<p>But not everyone has a hypervisor in their basement. Forking over $20/year is definitely better on the budget than buying a server.<p>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.
Wow! I could have written this. PiHole works great... until your personal server does something weird or hangs or crashes or power flickers.<p>NextDNS just works. Allowlists are pretty easy to implement too for those edge cases.
I disagree with the author that NextDNS is “essentially a finished product”.<p>For me NextDNS is not that usable and is not a finished product because:<p>a) I need the ability to turn it off temporarily once in a while (even if it’s on a family member’s device)<p>b) the NextDNS client apps on iOS/iPadOS are abandoned (not updated for years) and the toggle to turn off or on doesn’t reliably work<p>c) there is hardly any support in the community forums<p>With the abandoned and flakey client apps, visiting test.nextdns.com would show “unconfigured” or a NextDNS server information randomly. I never know whether it’s really on or not.<p>Using a VPN profile is recommended through it cannot be easily turned off and on. But even the VPN profile doesn’t work on my Apple TV.<p>The NextDNS DNS servers around the world seem to work, but the experience on devices is unreliable and poor. If the founders could employ someone to improve the apps and how it works, I’d use it. I had considered a paid subscription a few years ago but didn’t go through because of these experiences.
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.<p>Update.. as usual I was trying this all day and only after posting this does this work - Here's a bash script <a href="https://gist.github.com/willwade/251fa791da27267b5470c75a7b55ff45" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/willwade/251fa791da27267b5470c75a7b5...</a> - a shortcut for this is way more complicated
No issues with NextDNS (I've deployed it for people who don't have the chops to wrangle a Pi-hole), but this reads very, very much like an ad.<p>That aside, I've had pretty much the same issues with NextDNS that I've had with Pi-hole -- issues that have nothing to do with the infrastructure per se. (The classic example is of an app that doesn't work because domain `X` is being blocked, thus kicking up the usual 15 - 30 minute-long log search and DNS cache-clearing to find and whitelist the domain.)
+1 for NextDNS. Have been using them for years for blocking ads but also helped me troubleshoot some issues, as I could live track DNS queries by device.<p>Note the free plan is great for several devices <i>as long as they’re not Apple</i>. For some reason, 2+ Apple devices blow through the 300,000 query limit really easily. When I used a Pixel 2 I think it averaged 60,000 and fit in the quota with my other devices, and when I switched to iPhone it pushed the total over 300,000. But they’re cheap and definitely worth it.
Always seems that people forget piholes run really well in a docker container basically anywhere.<p>The pi bit of it is less important than the hole bit of it.<p>and with things like Tailscale or ZeroTier you can run your pihole at home and use it from anywhere on mobile devices too<p>I run a couple at home and they've been rock solid in containers on mini-pcs for a long time.
I have an excellent experience with PiHole but why I like it is not for the ad block (this too of course)<p>It is the only product I know (short of running dnsmasq standalone) to run a DHCP linked with a DNS and what registers in the DHCP is also registered in the DNS.
Next DNS is IMO the best solution for phones. It's plug and play and I've never hit the free limit.<p>For home use I'm currently testing out AdGuard Home as it comes as pre installed with the Flint 2 router. I can't get it to work on my phone so I don't see myself switching away from NextDNS any time soon.
Have been using it for a long time, never have any issues and you can even use it via Tailscale which is nice: <a href="https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns" rel="nofollow">https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns</a>
Don't run the pihole on a rpi, a basic computer with a real disk controller will handle the job much better. I ran pihole on an rpi but it kept corrupting the filesystem on any power blip.<p>It isn't the pihole software's fault here.
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.
Let's not forget that if you run NextDNS, you can check the logs and be utterly surprised at what websites you dad views late at night after going to bed.