While the popularity of using Pi-hole to block ads and malware at the DNS level highlights the broken nature of the modern internet experience, I find it equally irritating for different reasons. Sometimes updates break the system, and the only fix is to reinstall it, which thankfully doesn't take long, but it's annoying. Being able to generate DNS overrides for local resolution of self-hosted services is handy, but sometimes it doesn't always work, and my Apple devices complain that Pi-hole doesn't let Private Relay work on the network.

Perhaps that's me wanting too much from one tool, because Pi-hole was designed for network-wide blocking of ads and trackers at the DNS level. While it can create custom DNS entries, that's not its primary strength. It also forwards any DNS requests out, and unless you add Unbound or another recursive DNS resolver, the Pi-hole is only caching your DNS queries, which doesn't improve your security in the way you'd want.

I'm also a big believer in using the right tool for the job, and not trying to bend services to my will. That's why I was so excited when I heard about Technitium, because while it can perform all the DNS blocking that Pi-hole is known for, it's also a fully featured, authoritative, and recursive DNS server. You could even self-host nameservers on it if you wanted.