NextDNS' zepto-sel has been quite unstable since late March, and I was considering moving away from them as my annual plan was due to renewal within 2 weeks.
I ultimately decided to renew nextDNS yearly plan, but logging what I want just because… 'why not'.
## hard requirement
1. Server in KR (submarine cables can be even more unstable. Especially I don't really like my traffic reaching HKG, given now HKG is de facto colony of CCP, and I have serious reasons to believe CCP wants to talk to me behind bars if they have chance.)
2. Multiple profiles (I have multiple networks, for example one for my home network, another for rest of my family members', yet another for servers, and something else.)
3. ability to use Unicode for device name (while I'm writing this in English, English is just a 'secondary language' and canonical selection is Korean.)
4. as a bare minimum, have YousList in their adblock selection (KR specific list)
5. Statistics and log retentions. I like the nice graphs and pie charts, so no-logging public DNS resolvers are out here. (And logs are frequent discovery method for digging new host to block, for example self-hosted matomo instances of not-that-popular services)
6. No self-hosting. While I do self-hosting (for example, this site) I am not really good at keeping 9-levels of uptime required for critical infra, and I don't want to add one more systems to apply security patch.)
7. something more but I'm phone now…
## Where alternatives failed
- ControlD: no server in KR, IIRC it cannot set unicode device name.
- AdGuard DNS: no server in KR, I don't recall if I can set unicode device name.
- Their self-host software is out because no-self-host.
- Cloudflare Gateway: lack of YousList, and I think this also cannot set unicode device name… and their target audience is primarily business and I'd be paying too much for less…