So maybe a week ago pi-hole stopped working. That's not great reliability. A month of use before failure. At that time, I tried to SSH into it and it seemed sluggish to the point of being unusable. I didn't know if it was hardware (did the pi overheat and components were failing?) or software. So today I reloaded the OS and the pi-hole software. Reinstallation was slow & tedious, but it appears to be blocking ads. However "Queries Blocked" on the dashboard stays at zero. The "Total Quaries" count is being updated without refresh. That's almost half the fun...seeing that blocked count grow. However the most important part...blocking adds appears to be working. Went to various pi-hole testing sites and many news sites to test.
So what went wrong that it only worked for a month? Was it hacked? That's my biggest worry about a server always connected to the internet. And if it was, could a DNS entry or something be altered to send me to the wrong place?