I am one of those zillion users. I love it.

@bernhoftbret@lemmy.world pihole is great. I use AdGuard now but either is good. The important thing is having a dns server at home

Yes.

I ran it on a Pi Zero W for a bunch of years, and it was as stable and problem free as it gets.

Early this year I swapped out my wifi/router for a minipc running OPNsense. I retired the pihole since OPNsense has Unbound built in.

I used pihole for years, but the recent updates made me look for alternatives. There was a major (v6?) update fuckup, but also some random freezes and block lists going missing...

Looking for alternatives, I tried out Technitium. Extremely easy to set up, rock solid, running steady for about 6 months (with frequent updates), and they recently introduced built in high-availability.

I like it but just not on a Pi. I found it too unstable. I found it easier to host in a docker container.

Although these days i just use blocklists on my router.

I preferred AdGuardHome over PiHole, but currently my servers are collecting dust as I need to get electrical work done before I can hook them up.

It really sucks…

Maybe a controversial take, but I like pihole for blocking only - I have a pair of powerDNS servers set up for my internal name resolution. They recurse to Pihole, but can fall back to internet DNS servers if Pihole isn't responsive.

I tried pihole for local resolution and found it to be a fairly large pain to automate. Plus kubes has PDNS hooks for auto-updating DNS entries.

I run Pi-Hole in a docker container on my server. I never saw the point in having a dedicated bit of hardware for it.
That said, I don't understand how people use the internet without one. The times I have had to travel for work, trying to do anything on the internet reminded me of the bad old days of the '90s with pop-ups and flashing banners enticing me to punch the monkey. It's just sad to see one of the greatest communications platforms we have ever created reduced to a fire-hose of ads.

I have pihole running on an old Raspberry Pi B and it just chugs along. Except for the wonky update they put out a few months ago. That took some cleaning up after.
I check the dashboard a few times a day and it's a good way to notice network issues and misbehaving programs.
I'm also running it through cloudflared to encrypt the requests, in case my ISP is snooping on them.

Indispensible.

A longer answer would come out of: "What do you think of a home lab environment without Pi-Hole?"

pihole has got the best UX for DNS management hands down. it's easy, not overly complicated, and perfect for entry-level selfhosting.

the fact that it actively blocks ads is a bonus.

I use Pi-Hole unbound, and I really like it. However, Technitium seems to be the new favorite and has a lot of bells and whistles that Pi-Hole doesn't. I haven't run Technitium basically because Pi-Hole fits my needs. If I were just starting out, I would probably consider Technitium.

PiHole 4b powering my home DNS. Been running for ~4 years as of next month (and still on the original SD card I installed it to!). 100% recommend.

I use a RPi 5 running docker for: Pi-Hole, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Heimdall. Works great, and there's still capacity left to add more services.

I have that virtualized, times three. Two to have a failover, and third one with different settings for my kids (cloudflare's family dns)

My pi 1b handles the internal DNS for my game servers, which at this point is actually just minecraft because PSO:BB was way harder to setup than I thought. It works and it is extremely easy and it still holes all the tracking stuff too.

I mostly like it, but over the last few months I've had my pihole die randomly during the day, which killed my home network, and I had to walk my partner through rebooting everything.

I've now got redundant pihole instances, but I'd really like to know what is going wrong with pihole. Its impossible to replicate, and very sporadic.

I started playing with it, but decided that DNS was slightly lower level than I wanted to host myself (personal opion, more power to you if you disagree). Instead, I use NextDNS which gives me great control down to individual devices, blocks ads and malware, and doesn't bring down the internet for my entire home if I have a faulty power supply or SD card or whatever.

I set up split dns using a phone earlier this year, and it's been fantastic

Sadly, it was very bad. I tried it about five years ago on a Pi 4. In less than a year, the Pi crashed five or more times. Once it was due to a faulty SD card, and on several occasions it was due to other software on the Pi crashing. Each time, the internet went down, which made my family unhappy, especially when I was not at home and could not fix it.

I also saw little benefit as I already block ads on all my devices, and my smart home stuff has no internet access at router level.

I haven't tried it since. Should I try again now with redundancy? What are the benefits?

I love it! It took me a bit to iron out all the kinks with my network, but I am completely happy with it now.

I use technitium, but there is nothing "wrong" with using a pihole. I used to run several (containers, plus one physical), and have set up quite a few for family and friends.

RPI is great but you have to consider SD card wear. It will not last you forever and at one point will fail. At that moment your dns is no more.