No additional hardware required, you can use it to provide some protection to your family without having to worry about remote access to the Pi-Hole to configure things, works for your devices on the go, cheaper than running pi-hole in the cloud yourself unless.

Pricing wise it’s over 2 years worth of service for the price of an original Pi, a good SD card and a case.

The only circumstances where Pi Hole is unquestionably superior is if you are on a network that redirects all DNS requests there are still some ISPs that do that however if you are on such network you probably want to either get off it ASAP or use a VPN.

FWIW, pihole is not tied to any particular hardware. For example:

https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole

You can also just install it on Debian. I have it in a VM.

Their install script is at https://install.pi-hole.net

Docs: https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/basic-install/

I know I mentioned you can run it in the cloud/hosted, however for most home installations unless you have a dedicated VM server that is always on it does requires additional hardware.

I run pi-hole on my qnap nas at home since it’s always on anyhow.

And in addition you can do other stuff on the pi/device.

One should always have a spare Pi around.

Yeah that docker is great! Though it lags behind a bit, it's still on 4.2.2.

v5.0 image was released minutes after the main v5.0 release. I've personally not tried :latest, but I am told that works. I prefer to use named tags

I don't think it's live on latest. I just did a fresh pull again (I did it a couple hours ago too) but I don't see the new bar graphs nor the local DNS option.

Edit: Oops I didn't wipe the container. Works now!

Interesting, thanks!

I've been thinking about running a Pi-hole at home and redirecting all my phone traffic through it via WireGuard.

I do exactly that, though I run my VPN in the cloud (a scaleway instance which is only 3 euro per month). Using algo for the vpn: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo . I can highly recommend it! Though I had some issues with play store updates being blocked but that's resolved now. Unfortunately google play services are essentially one big spyware collection so it makes sense for it to block them.

I also had to manually provision my Android phone on IKEv2 (ipsec), Algo used to provide a strongswan config but unfortunately they dropped this in favour of wireguard. But you can still set it up manually (and on Samsung devices you don't even need strongswan). Wireguard is faster, yes, but my work blocks pretty much every port they don't know, except IKEv2/ipsec because many contractors use it to connect to their work :)

Also, unless you go through the trouble of setting up unbound, your requests would need to go to an upstream server anyway, so might as well send them to one with the best privacy policy.

max laziness and convenience ;)

^^ this

though they do also have some additional security protections for typosquatting, safebrowsing, homoglyphs, threat-intelligence which is also nice. All of which could be done on a pihole though not out of the box when I last used it ~2 years ago.

I use a smart DNS to unblock streaming web sites that are geo-locked.