Thanks to its extensive blocklist of ad providers, Pi-hole plucks out all the incoming ads and punts them down its own sort of black hole. VPN Deals: Lifetime license for $16, monthly plans at $1 & moreĪs your computer pulls in those sites, their data passes through Pi-hole. In the simplest terms, DNS servers are the phone books of the web, matching the domain name you type in to browse to a site with the matching IP number that'll actually get you there. Pi-hole sets itself up as a DNS server for your network, routing your requests for addresses to actual DNS servers elsewhere on the Internet.
Let's walk through the steps you'll need to get it Pi-hole up and running. Installation isn't easy, but it's not impossible, either. This open-source app was originally designed for the Raspberry Pi, but you don't need one of those tiny, inexpensive computers to run it. But now there's Pi-hole, a way to automatically block web ads on every device across your entire network, for free. You can install adblocker software on each individual web-connected device you use. But there sure are a lot of them, right? They're not always pretty to look at, they devour bandwidth, and they slow download times for your favorite sites. Web ads keep fine enterprises like this very site afloat.
