I&#x27;ve been using the hosts file method for years and have never had an issue with checking Google analytics. I use the &quot;Someone who cares&quot; link.<p>Aside Google sponsored links and the odd ad sponsored link on pseudo-news sites not working (due to them being tracking URLs), I can&#x27;t see it ever gets in my way.<p>However to answer your question, these days I run dnsmasq on my home server and have my DHCP server assign that as my primary DNS. So every device (phone, laptop, smart TV, etc) gets their ads blocked as well - which is particularly good for my TV as it&#x27;s bad enough having regular adverts on TV without LG pushing out sponsored content as well. So if there was a rare occasion that I needed to turn off my ad blocking, I&#x27;d just change the DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS) then switch back to my dnsmasq server once i was done (the only complication being that I sometimes need to close and reopen the browser due to that particular application caching the DNS lookup)<p>The nice thing about using dnsmasq is that you can import those hosts files verbatim. Which means your update script can be simple.