I run my PiHole on a small cloud VM that I use for several projects, but put it behind a VPN that's configured to only forward DNS lookups, then VPN into it from my phone. So many advantages behind this setup.
- Since only DNS lookups are tunneled, I don't have to worry about tunneling ALL my traffic and paying egress fees
- Blocks ads in ALL apps, not just my browser
- If it's acting up, I can just disconnect from the VPN to disable PiHoling
- Don't have to expose my home IP address and open a port for the world to start banging on
> Don't have to expose my home IP address and open a port for the world to start banging on
Is that really an issue if all you're exposing is the VPN port? Wireguard for instance has industrial-grade encryption. Even open port 51820 should be fine
With wireguard in particular, you're probably not running much risk, as wireguard runs over UDP, and as long as you're not connecting with a correct (recognized) key, it will not even generate a response, so a potential attacker has no way of knowing for sure that wireguard is running on a given port.
I run my PiHole on a small cloud VM that I use for several projects, but put it behind a VPN that's configured to only forward DNS lookups, then VPN into it from my phone. So many advantages behind this setup.
- Since only DNS lookups are tunneled, I don't have to worry about tunneling ALL my traffic and paying egress fees
- Blocks ads in ALL apps, not just my browser
- If it's acting up, I can just disconnect from the VPN to disable PiHoling
- Don't have to expose my home IP address and open a port for the world to start banging on