Block Ads at a Network Level with Pi-Hole and an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter

Advertisements are incredibly annoying, and I’m saying this as someone who relies on them for income on The Polyglot Developer. Even with ad providers such as Google saying that they’re working to provide a better experience, things seem to be getting worse. You could use tools like Adblock Plus in the browser, but what about mobile devices? Better yet, what about all the websites out there that detect when an ad blocker is being used and make the browsing experience even worse by denying access?

To get beyond these advertisement related problems, you’re going to need to handle things from a network level, not a per device level.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to configure Pi-Hole, a popular network level ad blocking solution. For this example we’re going to use it with a Raspberry Pi and an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, even though other networking hardware can be substituted.