Pi-Hole after 1 year – 03/07/2025

I have been using the “Pi-hole” DNS server software for over a year.

Below: the data from the last 24 hours

I host it on my server, which has an i7-12700k cpu (12 cores, 3.6GHz) and 64GB of ram. Of course, the server’s only purpose is not just to run pi-hole, but it is one of the services that the server is running.

Pi-hole is a network-wide ad-blocker and tracker-blocker.

You can also configure it to block specific domains of your choosing.

It works via DNS, it is like a DNS proxy.

To use it, you configure your router’s DNS settings to use the IP of the server running pi-hole as the DNS server. Pi-hole then filters out all unwanted/blocked traffic, and forwards the valid requests to a DNS provider of your choosing (such as cloudflare 1.1.1.1).

It also keeps a cache of DNS requests, allowing for faster DNS as you don’t have to go to an external DNS server for every request.

Here is a diagram of how it works: (extracted from https://brianchristner.io/how-a-single-raspberry-pi-made-my-home-network-faster/)

You can also configure “local DNS”, where for example you can make the domain “server.local” point to “192.168.xxx.xxx”

Option 1 (like an A/AAAA record, with IP address)

Option 2 (like a CNAME record, with a hostname)

Pi-hole also logs all network activity from all devices, which you can see from the web dashboard.

You can also cut of all network traffic from a device/groups of devices/the whole network with the following setup under the “Domain management” section.

You then need to create a group, and then go to the Clients section and assign clients to the group.

You can then simply enable the “Regex blacklist” from the image above to disable all internet to the devices in the group.

You can alternatively also set it to the “Default” group which applies it to every device on the network.

You can also block a single domain with a similar setup to the one before:

Note: Change the Domain to the one of your choosing.

If you would like to set it up yourself, the official pi-hole website is https://pi-hole.net/

You have reached the end of this article. I hope you found it useful!