I spoke about how I didn’t see adverts in Meow Tower due to my installation of AdGuard Home in yesterday’s post. Today, I’ll briefly go into what more AdGuard Home can do, why I chose it over Pi-Hole, and downsides I’ve experienced.

Blocking Trackers and Advertisements

In the past, I used to install a plethora of add-ons onto my web browsers for blocking trackers and advertisements, and just accepted some devices where this wasn’t possible just had to have less protection. I also used to modify the hosts file on my desktop and laptop with the list found at SomeoneWhoCares.org, which gave some system-wide protection, but found it difficult to do this on my phone and tablet.

Filtering

When I first started on my self-hosting journey, one of the first reasons I encountered as a great reason to get a Raspberry Pi was to run Pi-Hole on it. A nifty piece of software, Pi-Hole turns a Raspberry Pi into a DNS sinkhole which essentially acts like a middle-man viewing your internet traffic and filters out requests made by websites and software, and instead of serving you adverts or trying to track you, the request gets blocked and dumped.

As you simply change your DNS settings in your devices to point towards the DNS sinkhole, available to change on the every internet connected device I have, no software is needed on the devices, so the filtering works in every app on phones or tablets without installing anything, and in all web browsers without needing to install add-ons, running faster and lighter as a result.

There are services that can do this for you, either for free or for a charge. However, I would feel uncomfortable having all my traffic run through someone else’s DNS, and depending on the service, you may not be able to configure the filtering just as you like.

AdGuard Home

However, I chose not to go with PiHole for the simple reason that I was starting out, and AdGuard Home was very easy to install with just a few commands, and then I just finished the rest of the setup via a web browser.

I haven’t needed to tweak much out of the box, but I added three popular blocklists (which is probably overkill!) to filter as much as possible, currently using:

• HaGeZi’s Pro Blocklist
• OISD Blocklist Big
• Steven Black’s List

Adding them is incredibly simple, a few clicks and you can just copy and paste in the URL of a list and then you’re done! There is also a page to block specific popular services without needing such a list, such as Steam, TikTok, Instagram and many more, though I just use the blocklist feature for my filtering.

Effectiveness

It’s actually quite scary how effective AdGuard Home has been. When you load up the homepage, you see statistics of how many requests have been made in the past twenty-four hours, how many were blocked, what the top queried domains were, and the most blocked domains, among other pieces of information.

As I write this, my devices made nearly thirty-five thousand DNS queries, and AdGuard Home blocked 54% of them, preventing over half of the requests made!

So, it works well. I don’t see any advertisements, outside of those listed by AdGuard Home (sponsored content, YouTube and Twitch adverts), but sometimes the protection can affect how applications or some websites function.

For example, it’s usual in many mobile games to watch an advert to gain something in the game for free or reduce some sort of timer. In Meow Tower, watching an advert gives more clues in the puzzles and can be used to gain extra pencils, but none of this works with AdGuard Home turned on, as it correctly blocks the adverts from loading. I’ve also had issues with some links on deal websites, where a deal is linked behind a middle-man tracker, and the whole thing breaks when clicked on, with the page refusing to load.

However, I can usually decipher the broken URL to get the actual one, and although I have simply stopped using games or features inside games to watch adverts in exchange for something, I could always log into AdGuard Home and press the “Disable Proaction” button at the top to quickly toggle filtering off and on.

Conclusion

As such, while I understand it isn’t something everyone can do, I strongly recommend setting up some sort of DNS sinkhole, with Pi-Hole, AdGuard Home or any other similar piece of software, as it’s been one of the best quality of life improvements I’ve setup on my Raspberry Pi. It’s wonderful having an internet experience with hardly any advertisements and knowing companies are tracking me significantly less.

I understand there is an argument for ethical advertisements as a means for funding websites and journalism, but as a child of the 1990s and growing up in an age of adverts not only being extremely annoying popping-up with loud sounds, but were also a source of danger with viruses and endless redirects where you’d end up on pornographic or scam websites, I’ve just been burned too many times and don’t like having things I did not consent to happen on my devices. I simply don’t trust the internet enough.