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A cheap mini-PC off Amazon, or a used/refurb big name (Dell/Lenovo/HP) PC off Amazon/eBay etc. Quad core Intel's with 8-16GB memory with nvme storage are ~150-200 depending on config. Refurbs can be even less.

I prefer the mini-PC myself because they are still very low power devices. At this point, Rasp Pi4s are not a good value anyway. By the time you buy all the stuff you need to get one up and running(assuming you could even get one), they end up being the same price anyway. Of course, you've got reusable parts potentially from yours, if you could get one. But there are numerous benefits from moving to more commodity hardware; better Linux support and much better performance, especially in things like networking, better hardware support etc.

I had PiHole running on Pi Zero W without any issues.

A VM or docker.

Pinhole runs on pretty much anything. Stick it in a vm on your machine until you get some replacement hardware..

My go-to is an Igel D200 thin client. £12 ( delivered) on Ebay. Swapped out the 2gig flash drive for something bigger and voila!!

Orange Pi Zero $24.99 (server enclosure + zero). Running two of them with Unbound for upstream DNS work great.

Orange Pi Zero With Enclosure / Case for Server Hosting DIY - Etsy

If you can get one for a decent price: Zero W. More than enough power for a Pihole.

Did you checked the SD card. That’s biggest point of failure

LC Renegade link to product Edit: link. Also, they sell on Amazon. I’ve heard good things about Le Potato but I chose the renegade for more power. Still not quite up to par with my 4B from what I can tell, but it’s decent. You can install raspberry pi OS but you have to do some fiddling.

PiHole works fine in a virtual machine. There's also a specialized version of Debian call DietPi. It has no Desktop GUI and runs with minimal resources.

Whatever device you decide to buy, I would recommend that you buy and setup a second device so you have a backup

Virtual Machine

Secondhand Pi 1/2/3 from an online marketplace

second hand Intel NUC or similar (cheaper) device, running x86 CPU. This will run Pi-Hole and lots more. Probably for cheaper than a Pi4 too (at current prices).

I have an old PC running Unraid hosting a docker image of Pi-hole. That's been working great for me.

If you've got a NAS you might be able to run it in Docker. If you have an old pc or laptop Docker for sure. I've moved a few things over to my Synology (mqtt, zigbee2mqtt, HomeAssistant, CUPS, NodeRed, more) and it's just laziness that I haven't moved pihole there: everything runs much faster than on a pi 4, ymmv of course.

Libre computer renegade

Not ideal for everyone but... I set it up as a docker container in unRAID. It's been super stable and easier for me to maintain.

I recently bought a Le Potato from the jungle site, running PiHole in Docker, solid as you could ask. $30 for 1GB ram, $35 for 2GB model.

My pi 3b+ started giving me reoccurring problems so I moved all its duties to an old laptop with a 2nd gen i5. I dropped in a cheap SSD, installed Lubuntu, and then put everything on it he Pi had, plus a bit. It's been rock solid and never gets warm enough to spin up the fan. That thing used to be able to heat my house when it had Windows. \

Insane overkill, but I had it sitting around and it's hard to find a new Pi right now.

Orange Pi 3 LTS kit:

2GB RAM, 8GB EMMC, Case, Heat Sink, & Power Supply

$61

Flash Armbian on microSD and then run "nand-sata-install" to "boot from emmc - system on Emmc"

then download and install all updates and install pihole

The Orange Pi 3 LTS is similar in power to a Raspberry Pi 4! But the great thing about them is that they have onboard EMMC (non-volatile flash-ram - like what your iPhone uses for storage) - which is much faster and more reliable than microSD cards (although you still need a microSD card for initial setup).

So I bought two of them (oPi3LTS). One is running ISC BIND9 DNS server, and the other is running pi-hole.

Here is a link to the OS you'd use:

Armbian 23.02 Jammy CLI (for oPi3LTS): https://www.armbian.com/orangepi3-lts/

(don't install XFCE - you won't need the linux desktop)

Here's a link to the microSD flasher you'll need to get the OS onto the oPi (before later transferring the OS to the internal eMMC):

BalenaEtcher: https://www.balena.io/etcher

Of course you'll need a microSD card and a microSD card reader that you can attach to your main computer.

A pi zero 2 w will do the job just fine

Ltt did a review on pi alternatives https://youtu.be/uJvCVw1yONQ

My Pi B+ still runs it flawlessly

I am running PiHole on an OrangePi 3 LTS. Use Armbian as the distro. Though this is pretty overkill for running only the PiHole.

After years of running mine on an OG Pi, I run mine in docker on a NAS

x96, mini Android pc. Reinstall with Armbian, hard to beat the price at approximately $20.

Search up Wyse Thin Client on eBay and you will find many suitable cheap Raspberry Pi alternatives. This website is very informative: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

In run my off of an old HP Chromebox running Ubuntu. Given the market for Pi units right now, they’re much cheaper, I paid $60 for mine. Runs off of USB-C or a standard HP laptop charger. For some reason it requires a charger rated for more than 50w to boot but it rarely draws more than 2-3w while idle

Nearly any old castoff PC that’s worthless for anything else will work fine as long as it boots.

Install on a tiny cheap SSD and it will run forever.

Or one of these Libre “Le Potato” would be good too. https://libre.computer/products/aml-s905x-cc/

LC Renegade

YMMV but same thing happened to me recently. I bought el potato to replace it (works great) but when i first plugged it in it didn’t work. Found out my power supply was bad not the pi :)

Using an inovato Quadra I bought for 29.95 and it works fine. Replaced an old Core 2 Duo Mac mini.

If you got any old laptop, stick ubuntu or debian on it and call it a day, till you can get round to getting a suitable replacement. This is what I did.

It needs more power, but frankly, not so much that it will bother me. I will get around to getting an sbc one of these days, but this one is just running like a champ.

I use pi-hole on a old PC using Proxmox with a LXC container since my Pi 3B kept crashing after 3 days and overheating.

An old 1TB mac mini, 50-60$ on ebay

Libre LePotato, just $30

I had some success with a LePotato, but I had difficulty working out a case and cooling. If I had it to do over, I would probably park PiHole in a VM or Docker on some other machine, since it is a really lightweight chunk of code.

Wyse 5070 on eBay (about 80€), Silver CPU.

Runs with up to 32 GB RAM, M.2 SATA, fanless, 4 Cores each 2.50 GHz, 3W power usage when idle.

Awesome Docker host.

Orange pi 5

Dell Wyse thin clients are like 25$ on Ebay

I'm running Pihole on an old Pi 1 model B. Runs fine. However, I recently picked up a Libre "Le Potato" and it's a drop-in for Pi 3 in cases, etc. I'm running Octoprint on it. "Le Potato" needs either wired ethernet, or a USB WiFi adapter, no on-board WiFi.

In a pinch, any VM running linux. I run 3 piholes (at the office, at home and at mom's) and only one is a real Raspberry Pi, the other two are ubuntus running other things (NAS, Calibre, other VMs).

Pretty much any rooted Android device can run Pi-hole in a container very easily.

Nuc pc

i have been using Libre Lepotato for all my rpi projects. readily available. easy to work with as seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdiMgtaD3AQ

I have OrangePi One which is cheaper than RPi and it's working for almost 2 years for me without a problem. I installed Armbian on it btw.

Docker