Recently saw a post regarding pi-hole, and I am considering to try it out. I am wondering if it would fit my usecase, so I want to ask about specifically what it solves.
I heard pi-hole blocks ads at DNS resolution level, so it does not block e.g. youtube ads. For me and my family who mostly watch youtube with handful of blog surfing, what value would it bring? Most blogs do not seem to contain much ads, so I am not sure ad-blocking helps much there.
Given the praise pi-hole is getting, I guess there are more to it than limited blocking of ads. I would love to learn more about this topic, as I am blind on the networking stuff. Thanks in advance!
In addition to adblocking, some people use it for family censoring like blocking porn and gore on the domain level. It’s a more effective means as it would mean that your kid can’t go to ph on the family computer as well as their iPad.
You can block individual domains if you wish but there are also a lot of lists out there that are generated and maintained by the community to include new sites as they arise.
I like it for my iPhone for playing free games like solitaire and the like. A lot of these have intrusive ads but the PiHole effectively blocks the ads and I don’t have to have any third party apps running on my phone.
Additionally, I set up a VPN on my Raspberry Pi so I can take this adblocking on the go too.
You can also set up the PiHole to keep a log history which some people may want or you can use it to never keep the history for privacy reasons. I suppose this is another use case in ensuring your DNS server at home doesn’t keep a history of websites you visit from any device on the network.