A home network sends DNS lookups to ad servers, trackers and telemetry endpoints all day, and much of that comes from devices that never open a browser: the smart TV, the set-top box, the budget phone where every free app phones home. No browser extension can touch that traffic, because most of it never goes near a browser in the first place. Pi-hole’s query log makes it visible as soon as your devices start using it.
Pi-hole deals with this one level down, at the network itself. It’s a small piece of software that sits on your home network and answers DNS questions for every device in the house. When a device asks “where is doubleclick.net?”, Pi-hole just refuses to answer. That ad request dies before a single byte of the ad ever downloads. For the theory of why this works, see the explainer on how DNS-level ad blocking works. This one is the practical half: getting Pi-hole running in an Indian home, on Indian routers.
why this matters more in India
Two reasons, really. First one is data. If your home connection is metered, whether that is a capped broadband plan, a 4G/5G router or a phone hotspot feeding the house, every ad and tracker the household loads counts against it. Video ads, auto-playing banners and tracking scripts can be a noticeable share of page weight on ad-heavy sites, and when the DNS lookup for the ad server fails, that data is never pulled down the pipe. To see the difference for the sites you actually read, open your browser’s developer tools, load a page with blocking on and again with it paused, and compare the transferred size.
Second is device coverage. A browser extension guards one browser on one device, and that’s it. Everything else, Pi-hole covers. That Android TV running ad-stuffed launcher telemetry, the budget phone where every free app phones home, your parents’ tablets, the guests on your Wi-Fi. Nobody installs anything. The protection is just there, invisible, which is how most households prefer it.
what you need, and what it costs
Pi-hole is famously light. It’ll run happily on hardware most of us would have thrown out as e-waste. Here are the realistic options for an Indian buyer.
| Hardware | Power draw | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W | ~1 W | Enough for a flat with 10–15 devices |
| Raspberry Pi 4 (2 GB) | ~3 W | The sweet spot; room to run more services later |
| Raspberry Pi 5 | ~4–5 W | Overkill for Pi-hole alone, great as a homelab base |
| Old laptop | 10–20 W | Free if you already own one; built-in UPS thanks to the battery |
At about 3 W, a Pi 4 running all year uses roughly 26 units of electricity, a small line on an Indian power bill. Think about that. A year of always-on ad blocking for less than a couple of restaurant meals. If you’ve already got a Pi doing other duty, Pi-hole shares the same box just fine. My list of Raspberry Pi 5 projects has ideas there. And if there’s a retired laptop sitting in a cupboard somewhere, my guide to turning an old laptop into a home server pairs really well with this, with one nice bonus: the laptop battery rides straight through the short power cuts we still get around here.
You’ll also want a microSD card, 16 GB is plenty, and ideally a wired Ethernet run from the Pi to your router. Wi-Fi works too. DNS, though, is touchy about latency, and a wired DNS server keeps browsing feeling snappy.
step 1: prep the OS
Flash Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) onto the SD card with Raspberry Pi Imager. In the Imager settings, switch on SSH, set a username and password, and sort out your Wi-Fi if you’ve got no choice but to use it. Then boot the Pi, grab its IP address from your router’s connected-devices page, and SSH in.
First thing, before anything else, give the Pi a static IP. A DNS server whose address keeps shifting around is useless to you. You can do this with a DHCP reservation on the router, which is cleaner, or directly on the Pi. After that, update the system:
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
sudo rebootstep 2: install pi-hole
The official installer is a single command. Piping a script straight to bash deserves a bit of side-eye in general, sure. But this is the documented way to do it, and the script is open source if you’d rather read it through first.
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bashThe installer walks you through a handful of choices. Pick an upstream DNS provider first. That’s the one Pi-hole asks whenever a domain is not on the blocklist. Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) and Quad9 (9.9.9.9) are both reasonable choices. Latency depends on your city and ISP, so run dig @1.1.1.1 example.com and dig @9.9.9.9 example.com a few times (install dnsutils if dig is missing) and pick whichever answers faster on your connection. Keep the default blocklist for now, switch on the web admin interface, and switch on query logging. At the very end, an admin password is printed by the installer. Write it down, or just set your own:
pihole setpasswordNow open http://YOUR_PI_IP/admin in a browser and the dashboard should come up. At this exact moment it’s protecting nothing, because no device on your network even knows it exists yet. Fixing that is the next step, and honestly it’s the only genuinely fiddly bit of the whole thing.
step 3: point your network at it
The clean way is to change one setting on your router: the DNS server it hands out over DHCP. Point it at the Pi’s IP, and every device picks up Pi-hole on its own the next time it renews its lease. No fuss.
the jiofiber problem
This is where Indian ISP routers make life harder than it should be. On many JioFiber routers the LAN-side DHCP DNS fields are missing, locked, or do not keep a new value after you save, depending on model and firmware. Check yours first; if it will not take the Pi’s address, you’ve got three workarounds, listed in the order I’d reach for them:
- Make Pi-hole your DHCP server. Turn off DHCP on the Jio router, and that option usually does work, then turn on DHCP inside Pi-hole under Settings → DHCP. Now Pi-hole hands out the addresses and names itself as the DNS.
- Add your own router. Ask Jio support whether bridge mode is available for your connection and router model, then plug in a router like a TP-Link or ASUS where the DNS settings are editable.
- Set DNS per device. Tedious, no question. But honestly fine for a small household. Android, Windows, and iOS all let you set DNS by hand for a given network.
Airtel Xstream and BSNL fibre routers (often Syrotech or Netlink units) usually expose the LAN-side DHCP DNS setting, typically under LAN or DHCP Server settings, though the exact menu varies by model and firmware.
Once you’ve changed the DNS, reconnect a device to Wi-Fi and pop open the Pi-hole dashboard. Query counter climbing? You’re live.
step 4: tune the blocklists
The default list blocks a sensible baseline of ad and tracker domains. Resist the urge to dump twenty mega-lists on it on day one. Every extra list raises the odds of breaking some legitimate site, and in India that often means breaking a payment flow. Analytics or CDN domains that banks and UPI apps lean on have, in the past, been swept up by some of the more aggressive lists. Discovering that through a failed transaction page is honestly a terrible experience.
So here’s what I’d do. Run the default list for two weeks. Keep an eye on the Query Log. Then add one curated list at a time, the HaGeZi Multi NORMAL list and oisd small are both well-maintained options, and live with each change for a few days before you reach for the next one.
One more thing, and it’s worth saying on a site that plans to carry ads. Think about whitelisting the sites you genuinely want to support. Independent creators and small publishers run on ad money. Pi-hole makes whitelisting painless: Domains → Add domain → Allow. Blocking trackers and nasty ads across the board, while still allowing ads on five sites you love, is a perfectly sane position to hold.
mistakes people make
- No static IP for the Pi. Your Pi reboots, grabs a fresh address, and suddenly the whole house loses name resolution. Reserve the IP. Always.
- Leaving the router’s own DNS as a backup. List Pi-hole and 8.8.8.8 together as DNS options, and devices will quietly fall back to Google whenever they feel like it, sliding right past your blocking. Offer one DNS server and one only: the Pi.
- Forgetting Android’s Private DNS. A phone with Private DNS set to a hostname (dns.google, say) tunnels straight past Pi-hole. Set Private DNS to off or automatic on your devices.
- Blaming Pi-hole for every outage. Keep
pihole disable 5min your back pocket. If a site still acts up with blocking paused, then the problem’s somewhere else.
FAQ
Will Pi-hole block YouTube ads?
No. YouTube serves its ads from the same domains as the videos themselves, so DNS blocking cannot tell them apart, and the same is true of the ads inside JioHotstar and most OTT apps. That is not a gap to work around: YouTube states that blocking its ads violates its Terms of Service, and its supported ad-free option is YouTube Premium. Treat Pi-hole as protection against trackers, telemetry and malicious hosts, not as a way to strip ads out of services that are funded by them.
Does Pi-hole slow down my internet?
No. Only the DNS lookups go through it, not your actual traffic, and a Pi answers cached queries in under a millisecond. Pages tend to feel faster, honestly, because the ad content never loads in the first place.
What happens when the Pi goes down or the power cuts out?
Devices lose DNS, and it feels exactly like the internet’s gone down. Here’s the saving grace: a Pi sips so little power that any small power bank, or a cheap UPS for the router, can carry both through a typical cut. That’s also the whole argument for going the old-laptop route, since the battery’s already built in.
Pi-hole or AdGuard Home?
Both are good. AdGuard Home has easier built-in encrypted DNS; Pi-hole has the bigger community and far more tutorials. The AdGuard Home vs Pi-hole comparison covers the differences in detail.
Blocklist tuning especially is something you never quite finish. But Pi-hole is one of those rare projects where an evening of setup keeps paying you back, quietly, for years. Follow the steps up there and enjoy watching that blocked-query counter climb.
Update history: removed hardware and electricity prices that had not been re-checked, corrected the blocklist names and router guidance, and clarified that Pi-hole is not a way to block YouTube ads.
Sources
- Pi-hole documentation — official install, upgrade and troubleshooting reference.
- Pi-hole command reference — the
setpassword,disableandallowcommands used above. - oisd blocklist and HaGeZi DNS blocklists — the list tiers named in step 4.