If you have ever installed an ad blocker in your browser and wished it worked everywhere — on your phone, your smart TV, your kids’ tablets, even the smart speaker that’s somehow started reading out adverts — Pi-hole is almost certainly the answer. It is a free, open-source tool that blocks adverts and trackers for every device on your network at once, without installing anything on the devices themselves. This guide explains what Pi-hole actually does, how it works, and whether it is worth setting up on your home or small business network.
What Is Pi-hole?
Pi-hole is a network-wide ad blocker that runs as a DNS server. Instead of blocking adverts inside a single browser, it sits between every device on your network and the internet, intercepting the DNS lookups that devices make before they load a webpage, app, or video. When a device tries to contact a known advertising or tracking domain, Pi-hole simply refuses to resolve it, so the advert never loads in the first place.
It was originally designed to run on a Raspberry Pi (hence the name), but it now runs happily on almost anything: a spare old laptop, a Docker container, a virtual machine, or an LXC container inside Proxmox. It is completely free and open source, with no premium tier or paid features gating anything meaningful.
How Pi-hole Actually Works
Every time a device — a phone, laptop, smart TV, games console — wants to load something on the internet, it first has to ask a DNS server “what is the address for this domain name?”. Normally that request goes to your ISP’s DNS server or a public one like Google’s 8.8.8.8.
Pi-hole works by becoming that DNS server for your network. You point your router (or individual devices) at the Pi-hole’s IP address instead. Pi-hole checks every domain being looked up against constantly updated blocklists of known advertising and tracking domains. If the domain is on a blocklist, Pi-hole returns an empty response instead of the real address, so the request for the advert simply goes nowhere. If the domain is not on a blocklist, Pi-hole forwards the request on as normal and the page loads exactly as it should.
Crucially, this all happens before any adverts, tracking scripts, or telemetry ever reach the device — nothing has to be installed on phones, tablets, TVs, or consoles for it to work.
What Pi-hole Blocks
- Adverts inside apps on phones and tablets, including many that browser-based ad blockers cannot reach
- Adverts on smart TVs and streaming boxes, including some smart TV manufacturer telemetry
- Tracking and analytics scripts embedded in websites, which speeds up page loading as a side effect
- Malware and phishing domains, if you enable a security-focused blocklist
- Adverts in mobile games and free apps that rely on ad networks for revenue
It will not block adverts served from the same domain as the actual content — for example, YouTube adverts served directly from youtube.com’s own domain are much harder to block this way, since blocking that domain would also break YouTube itself. Browser extensions like uBlock Origin remain better for that specific case, and many people run both together.
Why Run Pi-hole Instead of a Browser Ad Blocker?
Browser extensions only protect the browser they are installed in. Pi-hole protects every device that uses your network for DNS, with zero ongoing setup per device once it is configured. That includes devices where you cannot install an ad blocker at all, such as a smart TV, a games console, or a guest’s phone connecting to your Wi-Fi.
It is also genuinely useful for privacy and network visibility beyond ad blocking. Pi-hole’s dashboard shows exactly which domains every device on your network is contacting, how often, and roughly how much of that traffic is advertising or tracking related — often an eye-opening look at how many background connections a “smart” device makes.
What You Need to Run Pi-hole
Pi-hole is extremely lightweight. It needs very little in the way of hardware:
- A Raspberry Pi (any model), an old laptop, a NAS with Docker support, or a VM/LXC container on a home server
- Around 512MB of RAM is comfortable, though it will run on far less
- A wired network connection is recommended for reliability, since every device on the network depends on it for DNS
- A static IP address, so your router always knows where to send DNS requests
If you already run a home server for other self-hosted tools — Immich for photos, Nextcloud for file storage, or n8n for automation — Pi-hole is one of the lightest, easiest additions you can make, and works well as its own dedicated LXC container in Proxmox.
Is Pi-hole Difficult to Set Up?
Not particularly. The installer is a single command that walks you through choosing your upstream DNS provider, blocklists, and network interface. The trickiest part for most people is not the Pi-hole installation itself, but pointing your router at it afterwards — either by setting Pi-hole as the DHCP server’s DNS option, or by setting it manually on individual devices. Once that is done, no further per-device configuration is needed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Pi-hole slow down my internet?
No — if anything it can make browsing feel faster, since blocked adverts and tracking scripts never load, and DNS lookups are typically served from Pi-hole’s local cache rather than round-tripping to an external server every time.
Will Pi-hole break any websites?
Occasionally a site that relies heavily on ad-network scripts for core functionality (rather than just adverts) may behave oddly. Pi-hole makes it easy to temporarily disable blocking or whitelist a specific domain when this happens.
Is Pi-hole a VPN?
No. Pi-hole only affects DNS lookups — it does not encrypt or reroute your traffic. Many people run Pi-hole alongside a VPN tool like Tailscale so they can use Pi-hole’s ad blocking even when away from home.
What happens if the Pi-hole device goes offline?
If Pi-hole is the only DNS server configured, devices will be unable to resolve any domain names until it comes back online or your router falls back to a secondary DNS server. Most setups configure a secondary DNS server as a fallback for exactly this reason.
