Don't buy a raspberry pi just for this, chances are you have some old windows machine you can slap Ubuntu server on and set it up easily. That's what I did and I have very little Linux experience.
My favorite thing about it is ad-blocking in mobile apps. I tried to use it with OpenVPN on my android phone for ad-blocking when I'm on cellular data, but the speed it was unbearable. I'm not sure if it was my crappy router or what, everything I read says that DNS routing should be neglibible to speed.
The downside of pi-hole as opposed to a broswer extension is it's more difficult to allow things when needed, and whitelisting specific URLs can be difficult and slow to take effect.
>Don't buy a raspberry pi just for this, chances are you have some old windows machine you can slap Ubuntu server on and set it up easily. That's what I did and I have very little Linux experience.
But this would require having a full-blown PC running 24/7 and increasing your electricity costs by at least a few bucks a month. It would be much wiser to buy a $10 Pi Zero W and put Pi-Hole on it.
I agree. The rpi will pay for itself in electricity cost savings fairly quickly.
Also a reason to use a dedicated NAS appliance. Instead of the 60W minimum idle that desktops have, your at 1-10W idle with rpi zero and NAS appliances.
Small laptops might have a more efficient idle although, so YMMV.
Have had Pi-Hole running on an old 10" netbook for a little over a year now. Set it up just to play around with it, wound up being a perfect machine for it.
Agree about ad-blocking on mobile. The killer feature with Pi-Hole is that you don't have to set anything up on each individual device; anything connected to your network suddenly has near flawless adblocking.
My favorite thing about it is ad-blocking in mobile apps. I tried to use it with OpenVPN on my android phone for ad-blocking when I'm on cellular data, but the speed it was unbearable. I'm not sure if it was my crappy router or what, everything I read says that DNS routing should be neglibible to speed.
The downside of pi-hole as opposed to a broswer extension is it's more difficult to allow things when needed, and whitelisting specific URLs can be difficult and slow to take effect.