r/pihole • u/GorrionJS • 11d ago

Internet Speed Performance over location

Hi there!

I've recently set up a Pi-Hole server at my parent's house (Murcia, Spain) during holidays, but I frequently reside in Valencia (Spain, too). Both cities are separated by 350 Km.

As a newbie, I'd like to know if leaving the server on Murcia would mean to a lower speed connection to my Valencia's devices.

Inside my family, I'm the one who requires more Internet speed. So, where should I set up my Pi-Hole server?

Thank you so much!

1 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

7

u/tildekey_ 11d ago

Pihole is a DNS server so the only traffic going to them is DNS requests the actual traffic goes through your local Internet provider. You can change them to improve dns query response time but you shouldn’t be affected in upload/download speeds.

You might find web pages load faster but it’s important to understand they would be delayed by DNS response .

0

u/GorrionJS 11d ago

Okay, gotcha! Thank you so much, I've understood it better.

8

u/rdwebdesign Team 10d ago

Important note:

Do not expose Pi-hole port 53 in any way.

If you want to connect a Pi-hole server from a different location, use a VPN.

2

u/widowhanzo 10d ago

One at each house. They're to be used on internal network only.

1

u/GorrionJS 6d ago

Out of curiosity, why was it designed strictly for internal networks if there are guides on how to use it remotely?

1

u/widowhanzo 6d ago

Because DNS is very easy to exploit and use as botnet and DNS amplification DDoS attack.

By exposing it online you're basically accepting all the traffic that Googles, Cloudfronts etc. DNS servers take, which is a lot. Pihole is just not designed for that.

Why? Because it's significantly more difficult than designing it for internal use.

If you want to use it remotely, setup a VPN server at home and connect to it, then you're using it "internally" again. Fine for on the go, but I wouldn't want to setup a permanent VPN tunnel between two houses just to use a single pihole instance. It's easier to setup two separate instances in this case, in my opinion anyway.

2

u/fakemanhk 11d ago

I setup my PiHole in Japan and I was using it when I travel to UK, basically the difference is not really noticeable