> PiHole works 90% of the time, but when it did stop working, I'd have to spend a bit of time fixing it.
I don't know what problems you had with your Pi that resulted in 10% downtime, but that sort of hyperbole sounds a lot like shilling. Cases of SD card corruption are 99.9% due to the use of underpowered power supplies - just buy the official Raspberry Pi power supply if you can be bothered to search for a proper 2.5-3A USB power supply.
> At $20/year [...]
At $20 a year, I could buy a RPi Zero 2W and an SD card to keep as a spare every single year and have enough left over for a celebratory Sheetz sandwich. PiHole + WireGuard + $15 RPi Zero (once off) are unbeatable.
I think it's weird when people suggest that a self-hosted on-prem solution requires no maintenance and has so little downtime such that the time spent fixing issues doesn't matter.
I run a bunch of local services on RPis and a decade-old Mac Mini. I love having the control over things, but I don't pretend I don't spend a decent amount of time maintaining it. I only run things that don't need to be highly available, so something like Pi-Hole is off the table. The last thing I want is for our DNS to go out while I'm sleeping, and my partner has to wake me up because she has work to do.
You mention SD card corruption as the only reason why a RPi-based service might fail, but there are plenty of others: botched updates, random hardware failures, power supply issues, and likely other things I'm not thinking of.
And even if a Pi-Hole can keep three nines of uptime (I'm skeptical of this claim), many people will find significant value in giving someone else money so they don't even have to think about digging into fix a problem for the rare occasion it happens. Suggesting that a particular home-hosted solution is "unbeatable" is meaningless; "unbeatable" in this case is a subjective measure, and other people will value different things than you do.
> I love having the control over things, but I don't pretend I don't spend a decent amount of time maintaining it.
I don't know the nature of your maintenance, but I've had unattended security updates working for years, I automated a bunch of stuff and use etc-keeper.
> I only run things that don't need to be highly available
Redundancy helps. 2 (more!) RPis cam be primary/secondary/tertiary DNS servers to match paranoia levels. Even if you have a single PiHole, keeping a pristine copy of the PiHole on a $3 sd card will get one up and running instantly.
> Suggesting that a particular home-hosted solution is "unbeatable" is meaningless
Oddly I found myself upvoting this comment AND the parent. Neither are wrong. There is no right or wrong on this subject.
$20 a year spent on a hand-rolled RPi that you have full control over and enjoy tinkering with—amazing value!
$20 a year for something like NextDNS so you can spend your time worrying about more important (to YOU) things, amazing value!
It's wondrous the choices we have today. 30 years ago it would have taken a rack full of noisy servers and a few thick books to keep a DNS service up and running at anything even close to 99%.
Not addressing Pihole directly, as I don’t have much experience there. But have you maintained a router? Running open source firmware or not, router does require a certain level of maintenance, open source ones arguably more. But that doesn’t make it problematic enough to have a lot of downtime. Given some people runs pihole-like software directly on a router, I’m skeptical the down time there is significant enough to stay away from. I mean having high availability internet at home is hard, but I expect the rate of failure of a router to be similar of magnitude comparing to pihole. If you can’t tolerate the latter, I wonder how you solve the availability issue of the former?
Don’t want to jinx it but I’ve been running a pihole on a RPi 3 for a really long time - at least 6-7 years and the only thing I’ve had to do is an occasional upgrade.
I like the convenience and the fact that I’m blocking about 4M domains.
My TV is also forced to use it so ads don’t update on Android TV.
Not sure if NextDNS supports custom domain lists or not.
Back of envelope calculstion for my Rpi Zero 2W: 1W * 24h * 365 = 8.76kWh, which when rounded to the nearest dollar is $1 per year on electricity - so I guess I won't get the fancy Sheetz sandwiches, but it's not exactly breaking the bank compared to the $20 SaaS subscription
Effectively, yes, for how much it costs to run. You know if you pay for a service that your subscription partially goes toward their power bill, right?
I don't know what problems you had with your Pi that resulted in 10% downtime, but that sort of hyperbole sounds a lot like shilling. Cases of SD card corruption are 99.9% due to the use of underpowered power supplies - just buy the official Raspberry Pi power supply if you can be bothered to search for a proper 2.5-3A USB power supply.
> At $20/year [...]
At $20 a year, I could buy a RPi Zero 2W and an SD card to keep as a spare every single year and have enough left over for a celebratory Sheetz sandwich. PiHole + WireGuard + $15 RPi Zero (once off) are unbeatable.