I’m with Matt here, I use NextDNS instead of PiHole because it just works! Matt shares his experience in this post:

Sometimes it just wouldn’t work, and it wasn’t obvious that the Pi-hole was the culprit. The internet would just hang sometimes, and me and my family members would restart our phones/TVs/laptops, reboot the WiFi, etc. If that didn’t work, I had to futz with the Pi-hole. 

I would log in to the Pi-hole, see if the UI shows any errors, google them, and do whatever some guy on a forum says to fix it. Sometimes I’d need to SSH into the Pi-hole, check the logs, google those, or maybe do a software update. Often, just rebooting the Raspberry Pi fixed it, at least temporarily.

If I wasn’t home when it went down, people just suffered until I came back. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the Hero’s Welcome when I arrived, but I would prefer things to just work.

I get it, some folks want to own their stack. They want to control all their privacy requests and make sure it stays within their network. I used to feel that way about every single product. There are some things I still keep ownership of (like my website, hence why I don’t use a service like micro.blog or Squarespace even though I have so much love for it). Then, I have some things that I just want working, no matter what.

A bonus with NextDNS is that their copious amount of clients and their maintenance of them means that all my devices are covered, my router is covered, and apps that don’t support ad block (like Reeder on iPhone) are also covered. This is my favorite perk.

Power to you if you get there with PiHole! But I’ll take the “set it and forget it” option for an ad block experience everywhere.

Also, sometimes for work, I need to break out of ad block to view a certain page. That’s where PIA’s browser extension or PIA in general has been quite useful. I also have a bunch of rules for StopTheMadness whenever I run into sites that have right-click menus and what not. NextDNS covers the rest of my blocking needs.