Like the title says, I’m new to self hosting world. 😀 while I was researching, I found out that many people dissuaded me to self host email server. Just too complicated and hard to manage. What other services that you think we should just go use the currently available providers in the market and why? 🙂thank you
Personally I don’t think it’s worth hosting recursive dns resolvers. Most of the options with ad blocking are single points of failure and when it breaks the household acceptance factor is just too low.
Just…set up two RPIs with Pihole instead of one? Chances are your router can have a fallback DNS. Sure, you have to update the rules in both places, but honestly it’s not a big deal, and you now have redudancy.
I’m running 2 powerdns recursors and authoritative servers, and 2 piholes (long story why so many), and none of them have failed on me so far, and when I took one of them offline, I didn’t notice anything because the other took over. And if anything REALLY fails, I’ll just switch my router back to using cloudflare or Google or quad9 temporarily, and at least Internet access will be restored so people can at least browse the internet.
Pihole also has an API and a home Assistant integration, so you can create an AdBlock toggle switch for others, in case it blocks something and they need immediate access. Not ideal, but it’s a doable workaround.
This is really something that’s super easy to self host, and mitigate if something goes wrong. Especially since that commercial router is already a single point of failure for most households.
Chances are it can’t. You can probably set multiple DNS servers (anywhere, not just routers) but they aren’t a primary/secondary sort of deal. Most traffic might be weighted towards the first one in a list but you will find traffic still hits the others.