I saw this tweet from @DietPi_ a while back https://twitter.com/DietPi_/status/918947337048911885 and as I am just about to start using PiHole I wondered what the best/cost effective SBC is for PiHole on a home network? Wired connection rather than wireless.
Looking at cheap and low power so even a small PC is not in the frame. I have an OrangePi Zero kicking about and wondered how that would fare.
Cheers.
From my limited understanding of PiHole, it requires very little resources, so the best SBC is the one you already have, and if you have none the best is probably the cheapest.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
PiHole is great - been using it for a long time.
It’s a pretty light program. I’ve ran it on much older Odroid quad core for a long time.
I have an OrangePi Zero kicking about and wondered how that would fare.
Use what you have. That should do fine. Capable CPU in that. Nothing beats the cost $0 
Anything with 1GBit ETH to reduce network latency, should be good enough:
RPi has noticeable latency for requests due sloppy/bottlenecked ethernet shared with USB 2.0 bus, additional 10-100ms+ at least for requests, compared to above.
I’ve run it on a nanopi neo, thinking that as Pihole was all it would do it was ideal (as it’s basically a cpu and an ethernet socket!), but unfortunately it was profoundly unreliable and would ‘let go’ of its connection to the router on a regular basis (and require a powercycle to bring it back up).
I’ve now got an old RPI1 doing the same job and it’s performed flawlessly so far.
Many thanks.