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>I also have no idea, in the context of modern web browsing, how large or small 300,000 DNS queries per month is[1]. It seems quite large to me - as if even my
by jasode 7y ago
>I also have no idea, in the context of modern web browsing, how large or small 300,000 DNS queries per month is[1]. It seems quite large to me - as if even my entire household would never possibly produce 300k DNS queries each month ... but perhaps I underestimate how many queries modern web pages produce ?
I just looked at my NextDNS stats dashboard for the previous 6 hours and it says 5900 queries. I was surprised by that high number. The intuition is to count in terms of manual clicks on urls but the part I underestimated is how "chatty" many web pages are with Javascript (e.g. analytics, ads, etc). In my case, I see about 1000 hits in 6 hours to just 2 urls: msh.amazon.com, content.googleapis.com.
Based on being awake 16 hours a day over 30 days, I extrapolate ~540,000 queries per month. This is for 2 people with no kids at home at the moment.
If my modest internet usage is ~540k queries per month, I'm guessing NextDNS definitely did the spreadsheet modeling to come up with 300k threshold so most people easily pass it after mid-month and therefore enticed to pay for the service to continue the ad blocking. When I get to that point, I'll re-evaluate the idea of setting up a Raspberry Pi-Hole. I really don't want to mess with hardware.
Maybe if I'm more aggressive with a local "hosts" file to locally block more sites to 127.0.0.1, I can drastically cut down the number of DNS queries hitting NextDNS.
- rsfern 7y agoFWIW, I recently set up pi-hole on a pi zero, and it was really pretty straightforward, even setting it up headless
- e_proxus 7y agoI tried this route as well first, since I had an Pi 3B lying around not being used. However, after having the Pi-Hole FTL service crashing multiple times a week and completely stopping the whole network from getting Internet access I ditched it. This was using the latest Pi-Hole version on latest Raspian. Some searching the Internet turned up some results about memory usage and such but the logs never showed anything actionable and I gave up on troubleshooting it and just went for NextDNS instead.
- BubRoss 7y agoPi-Hole is very easy and very polished. It ends up blocking almost 30% of all my dns requests.
- spikej 7y agoYou don't need a raspberry pi to run pihole... I have it running in a vm on a machine that is on 24/7 anyways. I installed dietpi as the OS and selected pihole in its install options. 10 min later it's up and running. No issues!