The beauty is that you can shove Pi in it of course.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Any reason to use this instead of a free NextDNS?
Local hosting
Additionally you have control over it. Sure, you don't need local since you're using it in conjunction with the internet. You control it though. You decide entirely what you want to trust and don't have to delegate that trust as much.
That was a great read. Really enjoyed that.
Nothing in this article describes it solving any problem that isn't better solved by an ad blocker. In fact they even admit that you still need an ad blocker anyway. So why bother with the pi hole?
Excellent question. You can set the Pi-hole as a default DNS provider on your router which will the set it as a DNS provider for any device connected via DHCP (which in a home network should be basically everything). This means ads will be blocked across all devices and apps instead of just your browser where you installed adblock.
That means you can play free games on your phone and have no pop up ads.
You can use Netflix ads tier and crave ads tier and the pi hole blocks them It's amazing!!
Does that also work with a VPN?
I've been thinking of setting one up for a while, if I have a home server would I be better off hosting it on that or as a separate device? What are the alternatives to a raspberry pi? They've shot up in price over the years.
Setup and run two.
This way if one goes down, the other takes over (also makes updates / maintenance easier)
If you have a server running, I wouldn't buy more hardware. They have good example documentation for just such a configuration:
https://docs.pi-hole.net/docker/
If your server already has those ports bound (specifically the DNS port 53) you are going to have to get creative; otherwise it'll work well!
Worst case, a cheapo pi 3 will do the job. At one point I had it running on a pi zero, so hardware requirements are pretty low.
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I personally like it on a dedicated Pi simplly because I don't want DNS to die if i'm doing other server maintenance. the Pi is pretty much set it and forget it.
But i guerss you might as well try it on your server first and you can always buy a Pi if you find it to be too much of a pain.
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Don't fall for the trap that they recommend an expensive Pi 5: I am running Pi-hole on a Pi 2 but you can basically run this on obsolete hardware, whether that's a Pi or a PC/laptop
I'm running Pi-hole and Pi-VPN on a Zero W (using a Geekworm case w/RJ45). It's not very taxing at all.
I also run two other Pi-hole instances in my server cluster (one in Docker and one in an LXC container). Mostly just for uptime reasons, so I can take any one of them down at any time to perform maintenance and/or upgrade.
You may even be able to run it on a NAS. My NAS supports docker, which means I can run a pihole on it. I have a Pi 3b as my dedicated primary, but my NAS runs as a backup.
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66.6% of all traffic is blocked with no functional impact on anything that I do
Okay. I’m convinced.
Misleading statement. It doesn't block "traffic", it blocks DNS requests... you don't know how much traffic this corresponds to.
You can easily find out. 2 machines (even virtual machines) one set it's DNS to the PiHole, one not.
Both hit the same sites in the same order. Compare network traffic.
That's only for a single case comparison. You can't draw statistically meaningful conclusions about what percentage of traffic the pihole has blocked over a longer period of time.
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I recommend having two. Otherwise your home internet goes down everytime you update or reboot or it crashes.
Interesting... And this is not a criticism, simply an observation...
I've a single Pihole instance running on a RPi 4 and have experienced not a single instance of any of the 3 probs you mention. Except, of course, the very few minutes it takes for a reboot which I can schedule and am aware when it's happening...
🤷♂️
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