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Comment by madjam002 | Hacker News Reader

I would have thought that the target market for this service are the sort of people who would just run PiHole at home, or set up their own VPS if they really wanted? Most non-technical people I know are just happy with an ad blocker extension so they won't be interested.

I'm interested to see how this pans out.

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They're explaining the technology they're using, which makes it sound like they don't know who they're marketing to. The average person isn't going to care about the stack, and the people who do care might not see the point in paying the price of a Raspberry Pi every month to run a Raspberry Pi.

Then again, if it saves a lot of people just a little bit of trouble, there's a lot of potential there. There's a lot of services that are like "dude I could have made that in a week!" but humans are lazy, and developers seem to be especially lazy, and many will happily pay for a pre-configured / hosted solution that "just works". :)

Yeah definitely, just depends whether people think the extra $4 a month is worth setting up a VPS for $5/mo and spending 5 mins installing PiHole on it. I guess there is no maintenance needed if you pay for it as a service. It's an interesting idea!

Thanks for checking it out! I actually am the sort of person that runs a pi-hole at home on a pi, but I wanted my family's devices to be blocking ads also when we left the house, and I found it a pain to always be asking to install extensions on each of the browsers on each of the computers, so a cloud offering let me manage it in one place (after setting up the DNS). I figured I was not alone as a hacker/tinkerer with a family and though others might benefit.

Yeah fair enough! Personally I wouldn't pay for a service like this as I have infrastructure at home that I run it on, and there are some privacy concerns around routing all my DNS traffic through a third party.

What ad lists does it use? the standard one?

The pihole is pre-configured with

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...

https://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/justdomains

http://sysctl.org/cameleon/hosts

https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=domainbl...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt

https://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt

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