Pi-hole
Live stats from look-what-you-made-me-do, the Raspberry Pi 5 that runs DNS-level ad and tracker blocking for my whole home network. These numbers update in real time.
Couldn't reach the stats right now. Try again later.
Hardware
How it works
The Pi-hole runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 that sits on my home network and acts as the DNS server for every device in the house - phones, laptops, TVs, consoles, everything. When something looks up a domain, the Pi checks it against a blocklist of nearly two million known ad, tracker, and malware domains. If it's on the list, the Pi answers with nothing and the connection quietly goes nowhere; if it's a normal site, the lookup is passed through as usual. Because it works at the DNS level, it blocks ads and tracking in every app, not just in a browser with an extension.
Everything that isn't blocked is forwarded to Quad9, and the Pi validates DNSSEC end-to-end - so it cryptographically checks that the answers it gets back are genuine and haven't been tampered with on the way.
It looks after itself
I don't want to babysit it, so it maintains itself on a schedule. Every week it quietly updates its own software, refreshes its blocklists, and installs operating-system and security patches - rebooting on its own only when a kernel update actually needs it. If anything ever fails, it's written to a log instead of failing silently.
- Updates its own Pi-hole software every Sunday
- Refreshes the ~2 million-domain blocklists weekly
- Installs OS & security updates, auto-rebooting only when required
- Validates DNSSEC and resolves through Quad9
- Logs every automated run so nothing breaks unnoticed
How these numbers reach this page
The Pi-hole lives entirely inside my home network and is never exposed to the internet. Instead of this website reaching in to it, the Pi reaches out: a small script runs every fifteen minutes, reads its own stats, and sends just these aggregate totals to a tiny Cloudflare function that stores them. This page then reads them straight back.
Only the summary numbers you see above ever leave my network - never which sites were visited, which device asked, or anything about what I actually browse. It's live, but it's not revealing.
Why it's called look-what-you-made-me-do
Every machine deserves a good name. My Wi-Fi is invisible string (yes, after the Taylor Swift song), so the Pi-hole guarding it became look-what-you-made-me-do - and honestly the song fits a little too well. It keeps "a list of names, and yours is in red, underlined" - that's literally a blocklist. It checks it once, and then it checks it twice and, oh! The ad server can't come to the phone right now. Why? 'Cause it's dead!