cloudblock VS nextdns

https://github.com/chadgeary/cloudblock Another one which you can use but with less work

2.) Cloudblock I use OCI's free tier.

It looks like you choose a DNS over HTTPS provider, and it defaults to OpenDNS.

/u/chadgeary made cloudblock which was super easy to setup with his tutorials

https://github.com/chadgeary/cloudblock pihole/wireguard

I’d recommend Oracle, as they have a free tier that should cover your use case. If your interested check out Step-by-step cloud deployment - Wireguard VPN

if you want to run it in the cloud, for free, and not rely on anything at home, use cloudblock and run it on oracle cloud infra, they have a forever free tier that i have been using for years.

https://github.com/chadgeary/cloudblock/ or https://github.com/chadgeary/cloudoffice/ are both fun projects

In case you're feeling ambitious, you can take a look at this project which is designed to make it easy to deploy your own ad-blocking VPN on a cloud server. Watch one of the step-by-step videos linked to on that page (like this one for Oracle Cloud) to see if it's something you'd feel comfortable setting up.

I've tried hosted Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home. They are good as long as I'm around to fix stuffs. Then I tested something which can be global (home) and also for individual devices -- Control-D, NextDNS, and Adguard DNS. All of them works pretty well. If I really have to choose, then it would be in the order of NextDNS > Control-D > AdGuard DNS. Affiliated with none, and have decided to subscribe to all three to further test them for this year.

https://controld.com

https://nextdns.io

https://adguard-dns.io

Okay but NextDNS' own homepage says it "blocks ads and trackers on websites and in apps" - https://nextdns.io

I first used Safari on Windows around 2006. Put me off forever.

You just need Firefox and the extensions that mean ads are never seen.

That said, take a look at https://nextdns.io

just run snort and get nextdns.io account and use those DNS servers to control your DNS.

I'm using NextDNS which can be integrated into TailScale MagicDNS. It works seamlessly. You may need to pay if you have a high usage rate. I pay for the Pro version but that's less than $30 CAD a year. I did have in house Raspberry PI and Pi-Hole DNS but it was a lot of work.

pretty much to the same effect of a pihole, yet you can get up and running in minutes. You can then configure wherever you please: your browser, your laptop, your phone, or even your router.

[0]: https://nextdns.io

Check out NextDNS. You can set recreation time and block things like YouTube and Instagram at all times of the day except during your recreation time. Mine for instance is between 6pm and 9pm. At all other times, I can have it blocked. They market this feature to parents, which I think is short sighted because it’s great for productivity and works much more effectively at the network level compared to blocking apps which, at least on iOS, are limited in their capabilities.

Update: So I can see in https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/wiki that the nextdns CLI I set up in opnsense is DOH, but I swear this wouldn’t work the first time I installed it, hence why I set up DOT. So confused now lol!