this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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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.