I think some are getting better as they try to have routers act as more of a hub of the house (lot of $$ to be made there). The interfaces will get better too as people are accustomed to smartphones and will stop tolerating the interfaces we've seen in the past. We made EasyTomato JUST to have a better interface and be easier to use (mainly for access control and bandwidth management.) EasyTomato is only a step in the right direction and it's only a matter of time before routers are a lot more pleasant to use.

Or try EasyTomato or any of the other Tomato variants (Toastman, Shibby, etc.). Super easy to install, has a pretty and easy to use interface, and it's all open source.

At EasyTomato.org we use Dreamhost as their shared hosting in free for 501(c)(3) orgs and then we use the free edition of CloudFlare in front of that. We don't have 1,000 users on at a time, but we've handled 250+ at once with no problem. The price is right at least...

Or even easier.... EasyTomato beta does this out of the box, no need to setup scripts. Just tick the box and ads are blocked network wide. http://www.easytomato.org/how-to-guides/block-online-ads-with-easytomato/