Selfhosted

If you just want simple ad blocking you don't actually need pi hole for it's web interface you don't ever look at once it runs. Unbound alone can do the job with minimal configuration.

Nowadays I even changed my setup to dnsproxy, which doesn't even need any config. It's just a handful parameters when you start it. And it does all the filtering for my home network as well as providing DoH access for when I'm not at home and connected from somewhere else.

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.