Have to say I've never had a single issue with pihole unlike the OP. It's literally been "install and forget" - not a single outage in maybe 3 years of use. When I use the Internet elsewhere I see what a good job it does when I'm at home...
I have also had 0 issues with pihole, but switched to technitium for the extra features. Only issues I have had were related to the SD card. Turned off query logging and 0 issues since. SD cards are an awful place to run an OS from.
I had very similar sounding issues to the OP and thought it's probably something to do with a suboptimal SD card and/or overheating or memory. I also ended up using NextDNS and tbf really like it. Does a great job at a decent price and the admin is useful. I keep thinking I should just setup another pihole but NextDNS are at a very, very sweet price point that by the time I renew (tbf I think I fit within the free tier but wanted to support it), I just throw them another 20eur.
Same. The only outages I had were self-caused due to my (at the time) inexperience with Linux and the hardware of the RPi it was running on - namely the lack of RTC support and my unfamiliarity with fallback methods for Linux that didn't rely on HTTPS for NTP. My own fault, really, but an amazing learning experience.
Since then, it's trucked along without issue for years. Couldn't use the internet without it at this point.
Mine craps out every 2-3 months for no apparent reason. It doesn't crash, there's no errors in the logs, it just stops responding. I restart the service and it's fine. No idea why. I setup a cron to restart it weekly just to keep it from being a problem.
I have the same experience. But I'm running it on a NUC not a RasPi, which probably helps a lot.
Having said that, I have a Pi running HomeBridge to make a Pi camera and some non Apple Homekit capable IoT shit work with my phones/iPad, and I'm pretty sure the last few times it's rebooted were due to power outages, and I can't remember the last time I needed to even hit the HomeBridge web interface, never mind ssh into it. I'm a little surprised unscheduled power outages haven't borked the sd card, it's not even configured to do the ramfs overlay thing.
My last problem with pihole was that I had forgotten the root user password on the system I installed it on. Exactly because I had set it up and then literally forgotten it...
It's running on my home server which is a low powered celeron J3120 (I think) on Ubuntu LTS , so possibly that may make a difference, although I've used pis in long term always on other applications and they've been fine but perhaps pihole may be too much for a pi.
Been running my PiHole on a ZeroPi[1] for many years without issues. Initially it was unstable, but turned out I had been scammed and the USB "charging cable" I had bought at the local electronics store had 1 Ohm resistance. Replaced it with a proper USB cable and it's been rock solid since. So solid I keep forgetting about it in fact.
For myself I’ve been running pihole on an RPi3 for 7 years and have never had one single issue with it at all. Maybe I’m just lucky I dunno. I’m always surprised when I hear people have issues with it.
I have been running pi-hole on a raspberry for years with no downtime, op is either pitching for the DNS provider or they have not deployed their pi-hole correctly.
I had similar issues with PiHole on a RasPi. I had to restart every month or so, until I noticed power alerts. Turns out the power brick was underpowered. Is running like a charm after changing to an apporopriate power supply.
I'm also a very happy NextDNS user. A couple other thoughts for anyone considering this:
• The free plan supports 300,000 queries/month (all features, unlimited devices, unlimited configurations) and is a great and simple way to test drive it.
• If you like the idea but want more knobs, many people are also happy with competitor Control D. I'd just caution that the two-year-old comparison¹ on their site is just wrong about several claims (including "lower latency") and is not without problems itself². I looked at them and chose NextDNS as a better "set and forget" option that also plays well with Tailscale³.
I switched from NextDNS to ControlD because of bugs and feature requests that have been sitting untouched for literally years.
I couldn’t even reach anyone to cancel my NextDNS subscription, so I did a chargeback - which went through because the card company was also unable to reach anyone there. It seems to be running in zombie mode.
I just learned about ControlD today and It seems their $2/mo per endpoint is pretty pricey. Do you just set it on your home router and that's it? I use my NextDNS with many different profiles and many unique devices. Are the ControlD features that much better?
Edit: I totally missed they have a Personal tab at the top that has different pricing. It is still more expensive for their full control plan.
I came to a similar conclusion. I love tinkering and messing with stuff. Those in my household also enjoy (tolerate) my tinkering. What they don't enjoy is when that tinkering impacts them and is unreliable. The amount of time I spent on a monthly basis keeping PiHole working (through updates, list updates, and the random "PiHole just stopped resolving all requests" was laid bare when I paid $19… and didn't ever have to touch it again. The bonus is that I can access it on every device I own, anywhere in the world. I appreciate PiHole and I know there are use-cases for it; I just couldn't go back after trying NextDNS.
This is, almost verbatim, my exact same experience. Used pi-hole as an excuse to get a Raspberry Pi. Used it for a long time but got tired of troubleshooting. Discovered NextDNS (from this site), and have been a happy customer since. NextDNS has not been perfect (it looks like they abandoned their app(s)), but it has the added benefit of working outside of my home network.
Regarding the client apps, I find them to be mostly not neccessary now that you can identify clients to DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS endpoints. What do you miss?
Being able to disable it on the fly is the number one thing I miss the most. Additionally, it would be nice to interface through the app instead of the website, but that's definitely under nice-to-have; the website is functional on a mobile device.
It is understandable that one would be frustrated with a Raspberry Pi handling critical network services like DNS.
I've been running pi-hole in KVM guest virtual machines for more years than I can remember and never had any problems. I would expect a Raspberry Pi to eventually choke on the demand of providing 24/7 service to a network.
But not everyone has a hypervisor in their basement. Forking over $20/year is definitely better on the budget than buying a server.
But if you already have a server or some reliable hardware in your LAN, there's no good reason to leave anything important up to a Raspberry Pi.
You can set a Pi to have a read only filesystem on card/stick with an overlay with a RAM based filesystem. Ship logs elsewhere or have a second card/stick.
A Pi can run for a very long time if you are careful. I run my dad's phones with one with Raspbx. It has two USB sticks in it. Both are bootable and the live one copies itself to the other monthly. Its unlikely that both sticks will die at the same time - glacial speed RAID 1!
I find pi-hole fascinating since it shows there is a sizeable market for open Linux routers in the home, but for some reason people seem fixated with running it on a raspberry pi. That’s fine, but it seems like the worst of all worlds? I wouldn’t say the Pi is particularly reliable, and it doesn’t have a switch chip inside it, or enough beef for heavier processing.
It’s all just standard *nix software that will work on anything from my SFP module running openwrt, to a reflashed MIPS Ubiquiti router, to my x86 FreeBSD box.
The Pi is familiar and comfortable for a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise use Linux or run any kind of server. It's genuinely not the best option in a lot of respects, but it's also the only thing a lot of people know and going to a dedicated server or generic Linux/BSD router seems intimidating, even if they appreciate the possible advantages.
Pi Hole was started specifically as a project targeting the Pi. It wasn't the first to do ad blocking DNS by a long shot, but it did marry a nice web UI to DNS and made it a lot more accessible. Nowadays I think there are much better options like AdGuard that do the same thing, but "running PiHole on a Pi" is a tangible thing to do with the RasPi you got as a gift and is an approachable project for a lot of Linux beginners with real benefits. You can find a million people on YouTube recommending exactly that, and walking you through how to do it step-by-step on a RasPi. Lot of people who are interested in tech but not so skilled probably don't have dedicated servers or know how to set one up, and I expect PiHole on a RasPi gets a lot of momentum from that as something cool and actually useful to do that isn't actually difficult/there are a million tutorials for.
Tl;dr is I agree with you, there are clearly technically superior options. But for a lot of the people you're referring to the alternative is not to run something better on a dedicated server/router, it's to do nothing at all and go back to using the router from your ISP.
In classic HN fashion I forgot to mention that the nice web UI must play a key role here, and make up for all the other UX issues that come with using a pi rather than just “apt-get dnsmasq”
Similar here. I use Unbound DNS plus 1Hosts [1] and a few others here and there and I block all the DoH/DoT servers. I also blackhole route known malicious networks.
Readit News
Since then, it's trucked along without issue for years. Couldn't use the internet without it at this point.
Having said that, I have a Pi running HomeBridge to make a Pi camera and some non Apple Homekit capable IoT shit work with my phones/iPad, and I'm pretty sure the last few times it's rebooted were due to power outages, and I can't remember the last time I needed to even hit the HomeBridge web interface, never mind ssh into it. I'm a little surprised unscheduled power outages haven't borked the sd card, it's not even configured to do the ramfs overlay thing.
[1]: https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...
• The free plan supports 300,000 queries/month (all features, unlimited devices, unlimited configurations) and is a great and simple way to test drive it.
• If you like the idea but want more knobs, many people are also happy with competitor Control D. I'd just caution that the two-year-old comparison¹ on their site is just wrong about several claims (including "lower latency") and is not without problems itself². I looked at them and chose NextDNS as a better "set and forget" option that also plays well with Tailscale³.
¹ https://controld.com/blog/control-d-vs-nextdns/ ² https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlD/comments/1irgehp/178ms_lat... ³ https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns
https://tailscale.com/kb/1403/control-d
I couldn’t even reach anyone to cancel my NextDNS subscription, so I did a chargeback - which went through because the card company was also unable to reach anyone there. It seems to be running in zombie mode.
Edit: I totally missed they have a Personal tab at the top that has different pricing. It is still more expensive for their full control plan.
ControlD over NextDNS - one is on zombie mode it seems, the other isnt...
I've been running pi-hole in KVM guest virtual machines for more years than I can remember and never had any problems. I would expect a Raspberry Pi to eventually choke on the demand of providing 24/7 service to a network.
But not everyone has a hypervisor in their basement. Forking over $20/year is definitely better on the budget than buying a server.
But if you already have a server or some reliable hardware in your LAN, there's no good reason to leave anything important up to a Raspberry Pi.
A Pi can run for a very long time if you are careful. I run my dad's phones with one with Raspbx. It has two USB sticks in it. Both are bootable and the live one copies itself to the other monthly. Its unlikely that both sticks will die at the same time - glacial speed RAID 1!
It’s all just standard *nix software that will work on anything from my SFP module running openwrt, to a reflashed MIPS Ubiquiti router, to my x86 FreeBSD box.
Pi Hole was started specifically as a project targeting the Pi. It wasn't the first to do ad blocking DNS by a long shot, but it did marry a nice web UI to DNS and made it a lot more accessible. Nowadays I think there are much better options like AdGuard that do the same thing, but "running PiHole on a Pi" is a tangible thing to do with the RasPi you got as a gift and is an approachable project for a lot of Linux beginners with real benefits. You can find a million people on YouTube recommending exactly that, and walking you through how to do it step-by-step on a RasPi. Lot of people who are interested in tech but not so skilled probably don't have dedicated servers or know how to set one up, and I expect PiHole on a RasPi gets a lot of momentum from that as something cool and actually useful to do that isn't actually difficult/there are a million tutorials for.
Tl;dr is I agree with you, there are clearly technically superior options. But for a lot of the people you're referring to the alternative is not to run something better on a dedicated server/router, it's to do nothing at all and go back to using the router from your ISP.
[1] - https://github.com/badmojr/1Hosts
So does any non-trash router.
NextDNS just works. Allowlists are pretty easy to implement too for those edge cases.