Studies have shown that bandwidth (or network traffic) can be minimized by using adblock technology. Thus this resource could be better utilized by more important or more significant information to be consumed by the end user, not ads. A research has shown this to be by a factor of 25% to 40% (click here for reference). That is HUGE!
With that study and its statistics, it figures that one should be minimizing network traffic or find means and ways to reduce the non-significant content -- in the form of ads. One way to do this is with the use of Raspberry Pi (R-Pi). This is in fact a very cheap way to implement adblock, and you will see it is very simple to do.
This article aims to outline installation instructions over a popular R-Pi operating system OSMC. The installation procedure for OSMC has been discussed in the previous post. There has been a series of posts involving the use of Raspberry Pi in this site.
Prior to installing Pi-Hole, it would be good to browse its documentation and have a better understanding of how it does the adblock. Click here to go there.
The installation procedure itself is pretty simple and as automated as you want it to be. Just launch a PuTTY session to the R-Pi and run the command on the banner of the Pi-Hole website -- curl -L https://install.pi-hole.net | bash (or copy-n-paste this command).
It is as simple as it could get. Now the only thing that needs to be done is to configure the router to assign the R-Pi as the primary DNS server when it hands out DHCP IP addresses.
Related: Setup Caching DNS Server using TreeWalk
Once in a while, you may want to tickle your curiosity and find out how much traffic is blocked by Pi-Hole and you just open a browser and browse the admin console of Pi-Hole. It should be something like "http://RASPBERRY_PI_IP_ADDRESS/admin/".
On mine, it looks like this.. This statistic is after about less than an hour of having it installed. Do you have Pi-Hole installed? Share your story in the comments.
