What I like about pihole vs. dedicated ad-blockers, is that a pihole can block telemetry as well. There are lists of Microsoft and other data-gatherers you can import, and even if you can't stop the data collection, it dead-ends the attempts to upload it.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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...until your family complains that their favorite site has stopped working.
Pi-Hole these days allows you to create Groups so you can set certain devices to fewer or less restrictive blocklists or just leave their connection untouched entirely. Groups is basically how you solve the problem of it breaking something for someone else.
Source: Pissed off my roommate who I somehow accidentally blocked from using Google to appraise his magic cards or something.
Yeah, you always have to account for the Wife Factor with things like this. Good luck convincing your wife to stop clicking on sponsored links on Google, especially when it’s what she’s searching for.
Hahaha my partner just started not using the wifi and didn’t tell me, I found out when her data ran out 🙄
I'd recommend setting an ad-blocking preferred DNS if the person isn't overly tech savvy
Pihole is great. Been running it for years. It’s almost set-it-and-forget it. There are other ad-blocking services, some free and some not, some with more features but those are usually non-free. Many don’t require the setup that a Raspberry Pi does.
Downsides to Pihole:
People who use your wifi will stay with their old habits of clicking one of the first search results which is usually “sponsored”, an ad, and it will be blocked. People get irritated and it takes them a while to come around.
Raspberry Pis tend to eat SD cards. It’s gotten a lot better and it doesn’t happen as often, but once you get the Pi set up correctly, make a backup mirror of the card so it’s easy to get a new one up and running should the card fail.
The best mobile manager (Pi-Hole Remote) just went non-free for a bunch of features.
It doesn’t block everything. A standard suite of browser plugins for ad- and tracking blockers should be used.
Sometimes a website or service won’t work correctly and you have to sort out whether it’s a browser ad blocker or pihole that’s causing the issue and whitelist the address.
The good stuff-
You can create a VPN on your home LAN, use DDNS, and connect when you’re out and about to get ad-blocking on your mobile. Particularly useful for iphones where they don’t let you have ad-blockers for your browsers.
Customizable blocklists, blacklists and whitelists. There are several user-made lists out there that are useful.
You can easily see what is “phoning home” on your LAN and block it if you want.
Easy to update, easy install on a RPi, and if you install a VNC you can update and manage remotely without Pi-Hole Remote.
It’s free.
At this point the ads are winning because its getting much harder to stop them. A well tuned pihole is great for browsing and it is really noticeable when Im away from home. It has to be tuned, blocklists are great but you will definitely be managing the lists yourself. It is SO EASY to do, it is the most user-friendly open-source network tool I have ever used! Sleep on this to your own peril
look into a VPN to your home network when you leave your house. you can also set it to "on demand" so it automatically turns on when you disconnect from your home wifi.
Thats my next step considering that Im getting requests from house members for it. Took some time to smooth out the blocklists and now everyone loves it. Any recommendations for a pi3 running pihole with vpn?
Tailscale is nice and you can give different access to different people. It also tends to get past most VPN blocks.
Thank you! Ill look into it
I second the Tailscale recommendation. It was easy and has spoiled me. I notice immediately if I’m browsing my phone at work and I’m not connected to my pihole lol
You have your Pihole setup at work?
Nah they're connecting to their home network via a Tailscale exit node which basically runs all your ~~requests~~ traffic through your device/router at home/ external server, P2P encrypted.
And if it's got an adblocker on that network you soon notice if it's not connected since all the ads come flooding in.
I too third Tailscale, since it is literally now saving me money because work has give us pretty darn fast WiFi albeit with a nanny filter which the above exit node breaks you out of so I now don't pay for as much data on my cellular plan.
Neat, I will have to check that out! I'm guessing you can't enable it on locked down work devices, however.
That'd be dependent on your works IT policy and I can hear the resounding NO from my IT dept here at home :/
However if they're fairly lax, you could install it on anything from a Pi to a spare laptop.
Besides like I say it's now saving me money, I've also got the bonus of having off site backup storage at a family member's now since I gave them an old Pi4 of mine, setup the arrrr stack/Jellyfin/Jellyseerr etc and they love me so much now because of that, I don't think they'd even notice they're secretly part of my 3.2.1 backup solution (since they also get my remote IT support + their adblocker on their phone via Tailscale anywhere) ;)
As a noob who is only moderately tech savvy, how can I get started with selfhosting? Is it worth just buying a Pi to mess around with at first?
Yup!
Things you should be aware of thou are a Rpi3 and below only have a 100Mbps ethernet port, whereas a Pi4 and above have gigabit ports so if you're gonna be doing anything network related it might be better for you. A Pi5 again has one but then isn't as powerful GPU wise (sounds weird I know) and no good for transcoding things unlike the Pi4.
And saying that, I have two dinky Pi Zero's with DVB HAT's on them to give me my own HD Homerun TV tuners that I can access anywhere via Tailscale. They don't require much processing power and only operate over WiFi 2.4GhZ, but they work good.
If you want something to play with self hosting? Immich is a good start as the docs are as good as Tailscale's. A Pihole is often a good start to understanding your network better and allows installation via a simple curl command. Have fun!
Thank you, I'll take a look at those!
Ya know reading my comment again, something else I might advise is getting to know Docker if you haven't already.
However I find it shrewd to run anything networking related such as Pihole / TS / Zerotier / Adguard whatever is to run them raw dawg instead of in docker containers. Many recommended but I can't.
I've totally and others have too fugged up their network and not just with them in a docker containers. It's really sometimes very very opaque as to why things don't work.
https://joshrnoll.com/my-tailscale-dns-woes/
Immich and stuff like that is great in docker containers, but networking? No thank u!
I haven't - thanks for the tip! I've mostly been running Kubuntu vanilla, aside from changing some DNS configs.