this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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DNS services with blocks lists such as Pi-Hole, AdGuard, NextDNS, etc, provide a centralized config file for all devices on a network, so you only configure once, collect statistics, have built in block lists that can be easily modified and updated either automatically or manually and are fast.
Using large lists in a host file will slow local resolution. It wasn't designed for this use case as it's acting a flat file database with a limited amount of RAM allocated for the process and will get slower the longer the list. While this latency won't be noticeable in the thousands of lines, once you start hitting hundreds of thousand or millions of entries it will start to crawl.
Hosts file are also unable to RegEx or Wildcard entries which means you would have to duplicated lots of variations in domains...
I mean I can also statically assign IPs to ever client and keep a spreadsheet, but why don't I just use DHCP?