Everyone should use a Pi-hole
A family member showed me a news article on their phone this week from a well-known news site. Watching him load the article left me incensed: first he had to deal with a video popup, then a huge advert took up most of the page on his screen, overlapping the article title, then as he scrolled down the article other adverts appeared; two-thirds of the page was adverts in the end, many looked like news articles, or were clickbait titles.
I'd forgotten that the modern version of the Internet looked like this.
What is Pi-hole?
Pi-hole is a piece of software which blocks adverts and trackers for every device on your home network, all at once, without having to install things on every device; no browser extensions, no per-device set up, just instant blocking of ads and trackers everywhere in your home as soon as you set it up.
The difference a Pi-hole makes
I returned to the same article I saw on my family member's device on my home PC with Pi-hole off, then I reloaded the page, skipping the cache, with Pi-hole on. The results were as follows:
| Pi-hole off | Pi-hole on | |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 9.7 MB | 4.6 MB |
| Requests | 495 | 256 |
Installing Pi-hole
Installation is easy... as long as you're technically capable and have the hardware. As the name suggests, Pi-hole is designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, and if you've got one already, the Pi-hole website has step-by-step instructions for installing and configuring it.
But here's where this falls down in my opinion: there's no off-the-shelf appliance that would let anyone set this up: you can buy kits online, like this Pi-hole kit at the Pi Hut, but you still need to follow instructions to get it up and running, and enough understanding of how your home router works to configure it to work... then there's a danger that if it stops working, you might be without internet, and not know how to fix it because ... well you have no internet.
What if you're not technical?
All is not lost if you haven't got the means or technical ability to get your own Pi-hole though. You don't need a Raspberry Pi or router know-how to get most of the benefit. A few simpler alternatives exist:
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Install a browser ad blocker like uBlock Origin on each device. Less convenient than a network-wide fix since you have to set it up on each browser and on each device, but it's a simple one-click install and needs no networking knowledge at all.
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Switch your DNS to a free ad-blocking DNS service, like NextDNS1 or AdGuard DNS. No hardware required, and no installation: you do need to change a setting on your router (or even just your phone/laptop if you only care about one device) to point at their DNS servers instead of your ISP's, and ads and trackers get blocked network-wide or device-wide. Five minutes, no ongoing maintenance.
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Buy a router with ad-blocking built in. Some consumer routers such as Firewalla or Eero (with Eero Plus) come with ad and tracker blocking as a toggle in their app, no separate device or DNS configuration required. There's a cost involved here, but it's the closest thing to a Pi-hole with zero setup.
None of these are quite as powerful or customisable as running your own Pi-hole, but they'll strip out the worst of what my family member saw on his phone, without needing to touch a router config page.
- As of June 2026, the NextDNS free plan is capped at 300,000 queries a month per account; beyond that you'll need to pay for one of their paid tiers. ↩