Published Jun 9, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT Shekhar Vaidya is a veteran technology journalist and computer science engineer. He is the founder of TechLatest, where he has spent years providing technical analysis on hardware and Windows ecosystems. Now a Computing Writer at XDA, Shekhar leverages his deep background in NAS, storage solutions, and PC internals to help readers master their tech. My DNS setup was working perfectly. Pi-hole handled ad blocking, dnscrypt-proxy encrypted DNS traffic, and Quad9 resolved every query my network generated. I had been running this setup for a long time, and I rarely thought about it. Then I started thinking, if DNS filtering and encryption were already in my local stack, why was I letting a third-party resolver see every query my network made? Every lookup was outsourced to someone else’s infrastructure. That simple thought was enough to make me replace the public resolver with a self-hosted one — Unbound. I ran it for a week, expecting better privacy.…