Have to say I've never had a single issue with pihole unlike the OP. It's literally been "install and forget" - not a single outage in maybe 3 years of use. When I use the Internet elsewhere I see what a good job it does when I'm at home...
I have also had 0 issues with pihole, but switched to technitium for the extra features. Only issues I have had were related to the SD card. Turned off query logging and 0 issues since. SD cards are an awful place to run an OS from.
I had very similar sounding issues to the OP and thought it's probably something to do with a suboptimal SD card and/or overheating or memory. I also ended up using NextDNS and tbf really like it. Does a great job at a decent price and the admin is useful. I keep thinking I should just setup another pihole but NextDNS are at a very, very sweet price point that by the time I renew (tbf I think I fit within the free tier but wanted to support it), I just throw them another 20eur.
Same. The only outages I had were self-caused due to my (at the time) inexperience with Linux and the hardware of the RPi it was running on - namely the lack of RTC support and my unfamiliarity with fallback methods for Linux that didn't rely on HTTPS for NTP. My own fault, really, but an amazing learning experience.
Since then, it's trucked along without issue for years. Couldn't use the internet without it at this point.
Mine craps out every 2-3 months for no apparent reason. It doesn't crash, there's no errors in the logs, it just stops responding. I restart the service and it's fine. No idea why. I setup a cron to restart it weekly just to keep it from being a problem.
I have the same experience. But I'm running it on a NUC not a RasPi, which probably helps a lot.
Having said that, I have a Pi running HomeBridge to make a Pi camera and some non Apple Homekit capable IoT shit work with my phones/iPad, and I'm pretty sure the last few times it's rebooted were due to power outages, and I can't remember the last time I needed to even hit the HomeBridge web interface, never mind ssh into it. I'm a little surprised unscheduled power outages haven't borked the sd card, it's not even configured to do the ramfs overlay thing.
My last problem with pihole was that I had forgotten the root user password on the system I installed it on. Exactly because I had set it up and then literally forgotten it...
It's running on my home server which is a low powered celeron J3120 (I think) on Ubuntu LTS , so possibly that may make a difference, although I've used pis in long term always on other applications and they've been fine but perhaps pihole may be too much for a pi.
Been running my PiHole on a ZeroPi[1] for many years without issues. Initially it was unstable, but turned out I had been scammed and the USB "charging cable" I had bought at the local electronics store had 1 Ohm resistance. Replaced it with a proper USB cable and it's been rock solid since. So solid I keep forgetting about it in fact.
For myself I’ve been running pihole on an RPi3 for 7 years and have never had one single issue with it at all. Maybe I’m just lucky I dunno. I’m always surprised when I hear people have issues with it.
I have been running pi-hole on a raspberry for years with no downtime, op is either pitching for the DNS provider or they have not deployed their pi-hole correctly.
My only financial relationship with NextDNS is the $40 I've spent on the service so far. Another comment mentioned turning off query logging since that amount of activity is hard on an SD card, so you may be onto something with deploying it incorrectly
I had similar issues with PiHole on a RasPi. I had to restart every month or so, until I noticed power alerts. Turns out the power brick was underpowered. Is running like a charm after changing to an apporopriate power supply.
