[syntaxing]

I self host a lot of things, pihole and adguard is one thing I no longer self host for about five years now. $20/year for NextDNS for the whole family is worth every penny and most importantly spouse approved. My spouse doesn’t mind what we self host as long as the friction to use it is not too high.

[crossroadsguy]

NextDNS support now doesn't even bother to respond when you face a problem. If you are lucky a fellow user will comment which most probably won't solve the problem and it would rather be a "same here" comment. I had to stop using before even my first year's subscription finished.

[syntaxing]

That’s a shame, I haven’t had the need to use their support before though.

[floundy]

I have two pi-holes running concurrently, mainly so it doesn’t ruin the internet for my wife if one goes down. In 4-5 years of running pi-hole I’ve had I think 3 complete failures, 2 were due to cheap SD card corruption and one due to a failed upgrade to pihole v6.

I also excluded most of her devices from any filtering by the pihole because she wants to be able to click the sponsored links and ads on Google. Whatever.

[syntaxing]

That’s why nextDNS is nice, there’s a “allow affiliated link” setting. So it blocks the ads but allows your wife to click on sponsored ad links. How’s do you manage Adblock when you’re not on your network? That’s the main draw of NextDNS for me. Works more or less anywhere

[floundy]

Huh interesting feature, I'll have to check it out today to see if there's enough improvements over pihole to warrant a switch.

I'm effectively always on my network because I use Wireguard to VPN back in to home, so I can easily access my server and RPi dashboards. Though at this point I've whitelisted a few dozen domains that were giving my wife or I issues, and excluded most of her devices because she doesn't want to be on it, so it's pretty hands-off. The only time I have to disable the pihole nowadays is when I'm unsubscribing from an email list and the link is a tracking link. And that's with over 3M domains blocked.

[syntaxing]

Do you notice a battery drain with the VPN always on? I used to use tailscale for this and there was a nontrivial battery penalty

[floundy]

I've never specifically noticed WireGuard anywhere in the top battery consumers on either Android or iOS. Friday I was out of the house all day, and Wireguard running on cellular all day used 1% of my iPhone battery.

[mtlynch]

Does using NextDNS mean that you both can see a list of all the websites anyone in your family visits?

[syntaxing]

Yes but that’s the case for any DNS (which is why your ISP loves it when you use their DNS, for “marketing” data they sell to others). However, similar to pihole and adguard, you can turn off logging if you want.

[lemming]

Only to the domain level, not individual websites.