After installing my own Pi-hole, it is incredible to see that some devices (notably a OnePlus mobile) try to “phone home” almost constantly, and clearly get angry that they are not allowed. The scary thing is that you see all the traffic on your network The great thing about Pi-hole is that you can see all the traffic on your network.

I forget where I read it exactly (I am pretty sure it was on the Pi-hole subreddit) but it was quote on this topic saying You are able to monitor in real time the requests passing though your network and see what has been blocked, from which domains and from what devices. And given the dire state of internet connections in Australia, this can have a significant effect on your bandwidth and network performance. This may sound like a simple idea, but it is immensely powerful: depending on which websites you visit and which devices you own, it is not uncommon to have between 40 and 50 percent of traffic blocked. This is exactly what Pi-hole does: it has a long and constantly curated naughty list and should traffic try to come from any of the naughty locations, it is simply blocked at the port of entry. Just imagine that you ask person A for something and then person B turns up and tries to give you something instead or alongside the goodies person A, you might not take them, especially if you know that person B has a history of giving away malicious gifts. This means that when you are requesting data from one server and then another server wants to send you data, you can say no.

As a general, the data for a website (the stuff you want) is stored on one server and the advertising content (the stuff you don’t want) is served on a different server. The reason for its existence is that is that it is much easier for us to remember names than strings of numbers, so the DNS acts as the go between for the names and numbers. A DNS is a registry of addresses on the internet which is able to associate the addresses with their public Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

Pi-hole works by acting as a Domain Name Server (DNS). More succinctly, it means that there will be a device on your network, normally a tiny computer, which stops the routing of advertising traffic to any page that you are visiting. This means that rather than requiring that ad blocking be done at the device, or more often at the browser level, it is done at your point of connection to the outside world. Pi-hole is a network-wide ad-blocking solution.

Raspberry pi zero w pi hole setup