Good for you, many don’t have the same experience. Technitium is easier to set up in my experience, but you do you if it works for you. That’s the benefit of having free choices.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to sell you or anyone on technitium over pihole or pihole+unbound, they’re all free and I don’t work for them or anything. However, as someone that has gone through this journey with all of them, I’ll never go back to pihole, especially with the features technitium has and the importance of DNS to my home lab plus the incredible ease of setup.

Technitium does this incredibly easily. I fiddled with pihole and unbound for so long to get them to coexist properly, and pihole alone before that. The pihole part was easy although unreliable on a raspberry pi due to the sd card. It was better once I added an ssd to the pi, but it didn’t have recursive DNS. Adding unbound and getting them configured properly and coexisting properly wasn’t an easy task. Technitium has all of this in one package and was trivial to set up one or more clustered nodes. You don’t need anything to ensure they both work together, the clustering feature does this incredibly easily. One goes down? No prob, I see a discord alert from uptime kuma letting me know. When it comes back up cluster mgmt syncs everything and they load balance again.

My current setup has an uptime of 210 days, and likely would be longer if it weren’t for a power outage.

It really is so simple, I’d suggest everyone try it out. You can always change it back if you don’t like it. And, like the pihole, you can load curated block lists.

This is the way

Yeah but what you will eventually find, if reliability matters at all to you, is that the pihole isn’t the best for this. For one, many run on an SD card, which isn’t really stable long-term (I started here and had to fix it due to SD card corruption quite a few times). Second, you don’t have a backup. DNS not running when your machines depend on it equals an immediate outage across ALL devices (as long as you have it configured at your router level, which you should be doing, right?).

Technitium (and others) solve this problem gracefully.

I started with pihole (ad blocking) and unbound (recursive DNS), and that was a pain to set up properly.

Moved do technitium (which offers all of these in one package) plus the ability to natively cluster a second instance (so you have a backup load balanced instance for this critical service)

The best part is that setting it up if you have an old laptop or desktop running docker is incredibly simple. I had two nodes up and running clustered in less than 15 minutes. Took less time than setting up one pihole.

If you don’t have docker it may take more time, but that’s the slippery slope of setting up a homelab and running services like this.