That was a great read. Really enjoyed that.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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The beauty is that you can shove Pi in it of course.
Any reason to use this instead of a free NextDNS?
Local hosting
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?
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!!
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.
phrasing
I'm reasonably certain the name was intentional because of the way it could be phrased.
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.
Correct. The payload of DNS requests is tiny compared to, say requesting a webpage. So there might not be a huge decrease of bandwidth usage reduction. However, having 66.6% less DNS requests is still a win. The router/gateway doesn't have to work that hard because of the dropped requests.
Of course, because ads have zero bandwidth. /s
Are you an idiot?
As per the article
on my own network a whopping 66.6% of all traffic is blocked
I stated it's actually 66.6% DNS requests being blocked, not the raw bandwidth utilization. Raw bandwidth savings (by not downloading the non-zero ads) would be much lesser.
Can't we be nicer on the internet?
It isn't so much about the payload of the DNS requests, but about the content that would have been loaded if the DNS request hadn't been blocked.
If you load a page that has 100kB of useful information, but 1MB of banner ads and trackers ... you've blocked a lot more than 66%. But if you block 1MB of banner ads on a page that hosts a 200MB video, you've blocked a lot less.
Also a 66% blocked percentage seems very high. I have installed pihole on 2 networks, and I'm seeing 1.7% on my own network, but I do run uBlock on almost everything which catches most stuff before it reaches the pihole, and 25% on the other network.
I run a handful of instances across different networks, 1.7% is suspiciously low, you should make sure you've got the right lists. I like HageZi's
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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.
Can confirm. I have 10 year old pi2 that is dedicated to pi hole and even that is not utilizing all of its 1gb of memory
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.
I run mine on a PI 0. Also use it as a samba disk partition for transferring files.
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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 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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Raspberry Pi 1b > DietPi > Pi-hole > Unbound <3
I never hear anyone else talk about dietpi, I install that more than raspbian
Same
DietPi looks interesting, especially for a 0W and my older B+ model that's just hanging around doing nothing...
I’m running mine in Alpine.
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