Raspberry pi is powered through usb connected directly to Airtel router and any ad-hoc restarts will be in sync. There may be a chance of SDcard failure due to low power supply to pi but I am ok with replacing it when that happens.
After the initial setup and tweaking the block list never faced any issue and on the plus side It even blocks ads in hotstar.
DNS = Unbound + Cloudflare
Optional - setup log2Ram - reduces the quantity/frequency of writes to the SD card.
I was on the same boat as you until i had the windows 11 issue with large hostfile.
I had the raspberry pi with me since 2017 and it was lying in a box.
Router side changes once pi-hole setup is completed.
Optional - When i noticed some of the devices traffic uses IPV6 . i have also disabled IPV6 in router as I am not sure of the instructions to set it up and forcing all my traffic through IPV4 which is easier to setup . So far no issues faced.
I do not see the need to move to a different platform yet. I hardly login to pihole these days after my initial tweaking of the block list. It just works especially considering syncronous restart with router.
Apart from UI, did you find any features for moving away from Pi-hole?
On Raspberry pi 3B+ utilisation was in single digit until when I moved to log2Ram to reduces reads/writes frequencies to sdcard which now utilisation sits at ~25%
have been using host based blocking for half a decade, had less than 5 issues with broken cdn. apart from that multiple times saved from ads/malicious content, worthy tradeoff imo
We ran into issues with a few sites. And making them work back is very easy.
On android, there is an option to use private dns and add the link of adguard dns link there. So if I run into issues, I just disable this.
On pc its straightforward toggle for adguard or any extension.
So what extra feature does the pi-hole provide compared to these extensions or dns links and how do you disable? It’s not like we can sacrifice our browsing becz we like to use pi-hole?
I use a similar setup, wit h 3 pihole + nebula sync, and use keepalived to provide 2 VIPs for primary and secondary DNS. The 3rd one is mostly inactive except for healthchecks.
