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Comment by laweijfmvo | Hacker News Reader

I went from PiHole -> AdGuard -> NextDNS. My patience for tinkering and maintaining wasn't high enough to not just pay someone else to do it :)

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I used to use NextDNS, but pi-hole is such low maintenance it makes no sense to pay for a third party service and additional latency to do ads filtering. I set up pi-hole on an Arch Linux for ARM installation on a rPI 3 like 5 years ago and haven't touched it since. Still chugging along nicely.

The big benefit of running a DNS server locally is caching. Using any external provider means you have to go out to the internet for every single request.

With a local server, most requests are fulfilled from the local cache.

Hmmm, my router caches DNS queries.

You can run NextDNS on your router to solve this.

You can just run something like dnsmasq locally though.

Same except skipping AdGuard.

Having the DNS live on a pi sounded like fun for me but it gave me stress due to power outages. There is safety in knowing you aren't adding a point of failure that only you know how to solve.

I also had issues with adding backup DNS, since a backup DNS would be queried if the pihole blocked the DNS query -- so I would have to maintain two seperate blocklists, one local and one offsite.

I run AdGuard Home on the same device as my router, so anything that would take it down would also take down the entire router anyway.

I think my PiHole is up for 3+ years on a Raspberry Pi dedicated to that task. Did not fail once since then, so not sure if "DNS is going down" is really an issue. But maybe I've got survivorship bias.

Living in a North American city with power wires being above ground, I have had so many power outages in the last five year, it was kind of a crazy thing to get used to. My Pi would not deal well with power outages when running through the SD card and so I stopped using it.

I've had a raspberry pi and pihole going on the same SD card for approximately seven years now.

I also regularly reboot the pi by simply cycling power.

The solution was fairly simple. Send the linux log files to /dev/null (or whatever it is actually called, i.e. RAM) and disable query logging in pihole.

That's it. Helps greatly!

I ran it on an old laptop and never had issues. The extra ram and cpu + actual disk hd gave me ~99% uptime even after power outage no sd card corruption. Laptop auto rebooted on crash too.

I live in Vancouver BC, we have a power outage every 1-2 years due to high winds or fallen power poles. I noticed some devices on my home network whilst connected to power have power quality issues too, no doubt a UPS would help here.

What's the concern about power outages? My Pi-hole is back online much faster than my router.

But you don’t have to run pi-hole on a pi. I run it in an Ubuntu Linux container on my Proxmox server.

DNS issues during power outages is the least of your problems, as chances are your Internet and all your PCs are down as well.

Also, having two Raspberry Pi for primary and secondary dns is good practice, in case something goes wrong with the main one.

Why not run pi-hole in one of those kubernetes cluster for Raspberry Pi, and don't forget a set up a UPS for redundant power supply.

Or: in the rare eventuality that your raspberry pi dies, it takes 15 seconds to open your router interface and reset to the ISP DNS. Work smart, not hard.

I dare you to tell my wife how easy it is. I still remember OpenDNS being blocked in France the exact day I went for business trip and me not anticipating it (I didn't remember it was set in pi-hole)

Yeah +1 for NextDNS. It's so easy to setup and manage, and works really well.

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