Why I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads

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!

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.

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...

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.

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.

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?

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.