It was fun setting up a Pi-hole on my home network. I learned some stuff, found an excuse to play with another Raspberry Pi, and got network-wide ad blocking as a bonus. The whole thing cost next to nothing and played to my nerdy tendencies.

The problem with my nerdy tendencies is that they come and go. For months the Pi-hole just sat silently in the corner and did its thing. Sometimes the best computers are the ones you forget are there. But then something goes wrong, or I want to upgrade, or some other event requires me to get in there and do something. After so long since not doing anything with the Pi-hole, I forgot how to do anything with it. I try to take good notes, but always miss something and end up flailing about online frustrated and looking for help.

Enter NextDNS, “The new firewall for the modern Internet.” A couple of clicks and it was configured before I knew it. I installed the app on my Mac(s) and iPhone and everything just worked with almost no effort on my part. I don’t remember the last time something that I expected to be complicated turned out to be so simple.

I now have the functional equivalent of a Pi-hole but with none of the “joy” of managing a Pi-hole. I have better things to do with my time, so this is great for me.

NextDNS is free for up to 300,000 queries/month. I knew I would blow past that so I signed up for a very reasonable $19.99/year.

I’ve had no issues after the first couple of weeks, and blocking seems to be at least on par with what I was getting with the Pi-hole. So far, I love this service.