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Comment by ctur | Hacker News Reader

For those not wanting the overhead of running a service on your network, NextDNS sells what is basically managed pihole. I’ve used it for about a year and have been very happy. It also lets you use it on mobile devices for when you aren’t on your home network.

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I moved to NextDNS after my SD card died on my Pi. One of the biggest features is that I can enable this on my phone using Android's Private DNS feature, which means it works for mobile data without having to run a VPN. Covers all networks with no extra configuration. Highly recommend.

I generally like NextDNS, but the customer service is _literally_ non-existent. About a week after becoming a paying member, I had an issue where requests wouldn't resolve at all, and there was no way to move forward, and there was no way to get help from the NextDNS team. So, a good service, but not so great for your family members who can't track down solutions to issues like that themselves.

Very slick try-before-you-buy experience. And excellent, realistic pricing. I’ll be giving this a go.

> ctur - For those not wanting the overhead of running a service on your network, NextDNS sells what is basically managed pihole. I’ve used it for about a year and have been very happy. It also lets you use it on mobile devices for when you aren’t on your home network.

The overhead is very minuscule.. I always forget that I'm using it...

NextDNS allows automatically whitelisting affiliate links. That's not as easy in Pihole, making it annoying to use at times.

But otherwise I concur, I've run pihole for years without any manual intervention needed.

+1. Been using it for a year too, highly recommend!

Same, and I love the pricing. 20 €/yr seems very reasonable for such a service, I'm happy to be paying for it.

you can configure to use a self hosted DNS. I do this coupled with a VPN that was very easy to install and configure: https://dietpi.com . this VPN I access with ddns for free.

only fixed cost was the pi to run in (pi version 1 ram if by far enough for just pihole +unbound)

+1 for NextDNS, best $20 annually I ever spent. Been using it for close to two years.

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