I think I did not blog about it, but I switched back to a self-hosted AdGuard Home instance quite some time ago from NextDNS. To reduce my number of subscriptions, but also to increase my control over important infrastructure I use.

As upstreams in AdGuard Home, I used DNS4EU, Mullvad, and Quad9.

However, today, I switched to a self-hosted instance of PowerDNS Recursor. So no more reliance on third-party DNS resolvers, except the root and authoritative nameservers.

I try it with AdGuard Home first, as I later also want to set up a second PowerDNS Recursor instance on my mail server to make use of some more spam protection features.

Let’s see if any problems appear. When yes, “it was DNS”! 😅

Since I found a cheap lifetime license for AdGuard Premium, I’ll try it on my phone for a while. I’ve also configured it with my strict NextDNS profile. But now my phone not only filters DNS requests to block ads, but also HTTP requests. And while uBlock Origin works pretty well in Firefox on Android, I decided to disable it while using AdGuard to see how the performance compares.

The stats are at least impressive. In half an hour of use today, it tells me that it blocked more than 500 ads or trackers and saved me about 17 MB of traffic.

One year ago, I started using AdGuard Home instead of Pi-Hole to filter DNS requests and block ads and tracking. Yesterday, I switched to NextDNS instead. NextDNS has mostly the same features, but is hosted in the “cloud” and I have one less self-hosted service to care about. AdGuard Home is awesome, but NextDNS seems to be working great as well and also integrates with Tailscale easily.