NextDNS has been a game changer. I highly recommend it if anyone wants something similar.
I had nextdns, moved to pihole but the maintenance was frustrating- and I couldn’t use it outside of my home network (without more work with setup).
So went back to nextdns - I have set up different profiles depending on who is using it (so my wife is on a light version, no logging whereas my 9 year old son is on a lockdown down version with logging).
It just makes things simpler and is very reasonably priced
Maintenance? What maintenance?
I set up my PiHole a couple years ago and haven't touched it since.
Granted, I didn't set mine up on a Pi, I set it up on my EC2 box in AWS. That way, I could have ad blocking on my phone without needing to expose my home network.
Then the SD card died. Instead of digging it out to fix it I tried NextDNS and found it works as good or better while also being less work. Well worth $20 to me.
NextDNS' unlimited queries for its paid plan is also a large reason why I picked it over AdGuard with its 10m queries/mo limit. Even if I'll likely never hit that limit, I don't even want to worry about it.
# nx domain for disabling firefox DoH, so we can still get adblocking
# https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-application-dnsnet
local-zone: "use-application-dns.net" always_nxdomainBut what if your IP changes? NextDNS provides a URL you can call manually to resync your IP address. I recycled my PiHole with a cron job to just call it every minute.