Setting up Pi-hole for home network ad blocking
Pi-hole is one of those rare “set it once, enjoy it every day” home network upgrades. Instead of installing ad blockers on every browser and every phone, you put one small device on your network and tell everything to ask it for DNS.
In this guide you’ll set up Pi-hole, point your network at it, and avoid the handful of common foot-guns like DNS settings that silently bypass it.
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What a reverse proxy does (and why it’s useful at home)
If you’ve ever tried to access a self-hosted service from outside your house and ended up with something like http://your-ip-address:8123, you’ve already run into the problem a reverse proxy is meant to solve. It’s the classic self-hosting speed bump: you have the service running, but getting to it is clunky, insecure, and requires memorizing a string of random numbers.
A reverse proxy is a small piece of software that sits at the edge of your network and acts as a single “front door” for your apps. It can route requests to the right place, handle HTTPS certificates in one spot, and give you a central place to add a little safety—like access logs, basic authentication, or IP allowlists.
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