I’ve been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I’m looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will also cover the apps on my smart TV.
I run most of my self hosted services on a proxmox server, so I’d like something that’ll run as an LXC container or a VM. I’m also vaguely aware that various competing applications have come out since pi-hole first gained popularity. Is pi-hole still the best thing going, or are there better options?
NextDNS.
Also, be wary of relying on anything blocking ads on streaming services this way. They will likely serve them within the video stream, so not network-blockable.
NextDNS caps your queries per month on the free account. ControlD doesn’t and you can pick a various mix of their public DNS resolvers. You don’t necessarily get the granular control with doing it this way for free that you can get with NextDNS though.
If you do check out these, make sure you click the Secure Resolvers if you’d prefer for DLS/DOQ/DNS over HTTPS instead of Legacy.
It’s like $20 year, not everything good can be free.
I run pihole and my wireguard VPN server locks all queries through it, which in turn uses unbound and queries via different providers like Cisco’s OpenDNS, Cloudflare and Quad9. However, I wanted to present a similar offering that also has a free-tier without a query cap for people interested.
Your „free“ option just requires buying hardware that enables all of it and an intensive setup process and knowledge which might be quite time consuming.
It may be a good solution but it’s far from free for many people.
The free solution I was referring to was my comment about using ControlD, which certainly offers a free service…which is the comment that the other person was responding to.
Two things:
I’m also a fan of NextDNS. Have an unbound instance querying it.