Six devices tried to get online in one hotel room that night, and the VPN app only had room for five of them. My laptop was open for a client file, my partner's laptop had a video call running, both of our phones were quietly syncing in the background, a tablet sat charging by the bed, and the streaming stick — plugged into a TV that smelled faintly of someone else's cigarettes, just blinked there, locked out (the one device nobody in the room actually needed at that exact moment, which felt like the universe's idea of a joke). That's the unglamorous side of digital nomad life nobody puts in the reel: not the sunset workspace shot, just a small pile of travel gear arguing over one login.
Quick disclosure before going further: several of the links below are affiliate ones, and if you sign up through them I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I've run my own laptops, phones, and that same Fire Stick through every service mentioned here, mostly hunting for whichever one stops caring how many screens I bring into a room. Nothing gets recommended unless it's already survived a bad hotel wifi night on my own devices — the transparency policy covers the rest, if you're curious.
Six Devices Broke My VPN Math
For a while, ExpressVPN was the app I trusted without thinking twice — fast to reconnect when we moved from a café's wifi to a train station's, the kind of VPN that behaves itself even under a shaky signal. But it caps out at eight simultaneous connections (the ceiling most solo travelers never notice), and once you're moving as a couple with a laptop each, two phones, a tablet, and a streaming stick, you hit that number faster than expected. There's a very specific flavor of argument that happens when someone gets bumped off a work call because the other person wanted the football score on their phone, but ExpressVPN is excellent right up until that exact moment. If you've ever wondered whether ExpressVPN can actually handle a full day of Microsoft Teams calls, it can — the connection was never the weak point, the guest list was.
What Actually Changed With Unlimited Connections
Before switching, I tried something cheaper first: a second streaming subscription registered in a different country, betting that the overlap between the two libraries would cover whatever the first one missed. It didn't work — the overlap was thinner than expected, I was now juggling two logins for half the shows I actually wanted, and it did nothing about the device cap anyway. Surfshark's Unlimited Devices plan is what actually solved the underlying problem instead of working around it. I put it on everything — both laptops, both phones, the tablet, the Fire Stick — and stopped doing mental math every time someone wanted to check email.
During a short-let in Príncipe Real, the whole setup got a proper stress test — two video calls running, a design file uploading, and the ethernet adapter behind the router wobbling loose in its wall socket just enough that the connection dropped for a few seconds every hour, like clockwork. Every device stayed online anyway, which is roughly why Surfshark keeps coming up as the answer for multi-device travel — though the actual pipe of internet coming into a building is still the real limiting factor once you stack six devices onto it (more speed overhead with every extra screen than any VPN alone can undo), a bit like a shared shower running short on hot water. About five weeks into that stretch of hopping between short-lets, the BBC Two ident rendered edge-to-edge on the first try on a borrowed smart TV, no spinning wheel stalling in the middle of the screen, which after months of Fire Stick roulette felt worth mentioning to my friend Yemi, who has kept a running spreadsheet of every VPN outage she's hit since she first talked me into using one back in our London days.
Keeping the Banking Apps Out of the Tunnel
Banking apps are a different beast entirely. Get flagged as suddenly logging in from Lisbon when your card is registered to a UK address, and most banks assume the worst — I've sat in a café refreshing a payment screen while a proxy-detection warning locked me out mid-transaction, which is its own special kind of panic over lunch. Split tunneling is the fix that actually works: it tells the VPN to leave certain apps — banking, food delivery — running on the plain local connection while everything else, browser included, stays routed through wherever I need my streaming to think I am. Some people solve the same captcha problem with a dedicated IP instead, one fixed address the bank gets used to seeing, though it's not a setup I've bothered with myself. It's also the trick behind fixing Sky Go when it stops working abroad — half the time it isn't the VPN failing outright, it's just server-switching to find one the app hasn't blacklisted yet. On open café wifi specifically, that same connection is doing double duty: keeping card details encrypted from whoever else is on the network, not just spoofing your region for a show.
Four VPNs, Four Different Digital Nomad Habits
Comparing the ones I actually keep in rotation, since hotel wifi is unreliable enough that I never trust just one: ExpressVPN still wins when I need something to unblock BBC iPlayer without any fuss, especially on a hotel TV where fumbling through settings isn't an option (the eight-device cap remains the only real complaint). NordVPN sits in the middle as the steady all-rounder: specialty servers are labelled by what you're trying to watch rather than by city name, so there's less guessing involved, and its ad-blocking runs at the DNS level before a page even finishes loading — a pleasant side effect rather than the reason I keep it installed. It also keeps obfuscated servers on hand for the rare hotel or co-working network that actively fights VPN traffic, though that's not a setting I reach for often. Surfshark remains the one built for couples and families dragging around more screens than sense, even if it occasionally needs a manual server swap to get past a stubborn geo-blocking wall. Private Internet Access is the one I hand to more technically inclined travelers — my partner leans on it for gaming sessions over hotel connections that have no business handling that kind of latency, and my longer notes on whether it holds up for gaming abroad go into more detail than fits here. None of the four handle every hotel's ancient smart TV the same way — platform compatibility between a phone app and whatever software is baked into the television itself is still the weakest link in this whole system, more than any VPN's server network.
What I'd Tell Zoya Now
Some full-time movers skip individual device logins entirely and carry a travel router instead — one already-authenticated connection broadcast to the whole room. I've never liked the idea of one more piece of hardware to keep charged and packed, so stacking VPN subscriptions has stayed the simpler trade-off for me, even if it means more logins to remember.
A reader named Zoya wrote in a while back from Doha, having moved out from Manchester for work and lost access to both BBC iPlayer and her UK Netflix library almost overnight. She'd already tried a handful of VPNs with no luck, and asked for the whole explanation written out rather than filmed — she said she'd rather read something twice than scrub through a video hunting for the one sentence that matters, which is fair, and part of why this stays a written guide rather than anything else. What I'd tell her now is the same thing I'd tell anyone traveling with more than one screen: count your devices honestly before picking a plan, not after the fourth one gets locked out at midnight. If that number keeps climbing past what any single VPN comfortably allows, Surfshark's unlimited-device plan solves the actual math problem instead of just moving it around. Everything else — the captchas, the server swaps, the odd hotel TV that refuses to cooperate — stays manageable once the device count stops being the fight.