Through the actually quite generous Amazon Alexa AWS Credits promotion I have free money to spend on AWS services, so I spun up a t2.micro EC2 instance (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM – approx £10 a month) running Ubuntu. I fully expect that for most people this will never be a problem, but for me it was an itch I wanted to scratch, so here’s what I did: I suspect a lot of the problems I was having is down to flaky SD cards. Not the performance when servicing DNS requests but performance when querying the stats data, when reloading block lists and when enabling and disabling certain lists.

Now that I’ve been using Pi Hole for a few months I have a much better understanding of its limitations and the big one for me is performance.

I came down in favour of Pi Hole for a couple of reasons but the deciding factor was that Pi Hole felt a bit more open and that it was built on top of dnsmasq which allowed me to reuse config for TFTP which netboots some devices which needed it. In episode 100 of Late Night Linux I talked a little bit about trying out Pi Hole and AdGuard to replace my home grown ad blocker based on dnsmasq and a massive hosts file.

Pihole vs adguard