For the past year, the backbone of hapara.fail has been Pi-hole. It is the legendary “OG” of network-level blocking—a fantastic piece of software that put DNS sinkholing on the map. It served us well, processing millions of requests and sinking countless tracking beacons from GoGuardian and Hapara.
But in the cat-and-mouse game of surveillance evasion, stagnation is death. As our user base grew and the “edtech” monitoring giants became more sophisticated, our infrastructure needed to evolve. We have officially migrated our public resolvers from Pi-hole to AdGuard Home.
This wasn’t just a preference; it was a necessity. Here is why AdGuard Home is the superior engine for our mission.
Under the Hood: Go vs. The PHP Stack
To understand why this switch matters, you have to look at how these two systems are built.
Pi-hole is effectively a clever wrapper. It stitches together several different technologies: dnsmasq (for DNS), lighttpd (web server), and PHP (logic and dashboard). While powerful, this “Frankenstein” approach is resource-heavy. Every time you load the dashboard or query the API, the server has to spin up PHP processes, which is computationally expensive and slower under load.
AdGuard Home is a different beast entirely. It is written in Go (Golang), a modern language designed by Google for high-performance networking.
- Single Binary: There are no dependencies, no external web servers, and no PHP interpreters. It is one self-contained file.
- Concurrency: Go handles thousands of simultaneous connections with a fraction of the memory Pi-hole would require.
- Speed: Because it runs as compiled machine code rather than interpreted scripts, the response times are faster, and the dashboard is instantaneous, even when we are getting hammered by traffic.
For us, this means we can serve more students on the same hardware, with less latency and higher stability.
Native Encryption: Security Without Compromise
In 2025, unencrypted DNS is a liability. If you are using standard UDP (Port 53), your school’s network admin can see exactly what you are requesting, or worse, intercept it.
Pi-hole does not support encryption out of the box. To get DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) working on Pi-hole, you have to bolt on extra services like cloudflared or configure a complex reverse proxy like Nginx. It’s a “hacky” solution that adds latency and introduces more points of failure.
AdGuard Home supports DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), DNS-over-TLS (DoT), and the bleeding-edge DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) natively.
This native support is a game-changer:
- Stealth: By using DoH (Port 443), your DNS traffic looks indistinguishable from regular HTTPS web browsing. It blends into the noise, making it significantly harder for school firewalls to isolate and block our service.
- Integrity: You can be 100% sure that the response you get comes from us, authenticated by our SSL certificate. No man-in-the-middle attacks, no injected block pages.
- Efficiency: No proxy middleware means the encryption happens directly in the DNS engine, keeping your internet fast.
Surgical Precision with ABP Syntax
Finally, there is the matter of the blocklist itself. Pi-hole relies heavily on simple domain lists (ads.google.com). While it supports Regex, managing complex rules is cumbersome.
AdGuard Home natively uses Adblock Plus (ABP) syntax—the industry standard used by uBlock Origin. This allows us to write powerful, flexible rules like ||goguardian.com^ that handle subdomains and edge cases with surgical precision. It creates a seamless workflow where we can push updates to the hapara.fail blocklist and have them enforced immediately, without the overhead of regex compilation.
How to Upgrade
The backend switch is already done. If you are using our legacy IP addresses, you are already being routed through the new engine.
However, to get the full security and privacy benefits of the new system, you need to configure your device to use the Secure DNS protocols (DoH/DoT) rather than just the IP address.
We have written full guides for Chrome, Android, iOS, and Windows on our services page:
We built this platform to prove that privacy is a right, not a privilege. By moving to AdGuard Home, we aren’t just keeping up; we’re staying ahead.
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