My Office Was Whatever Wi-Fi I Could Find. Until PureVPN

The moment that changed how I run my business was not a hack, or a ransom note, or a call from a bank. It was a drop-down list of Wi-Fi networks in a conference hotel in Lisbon, two of them almost identically named, and me standing in a corridor with a client contract open on my laptop, realising I had absolutely no idea which one was real. Nothing bad happened that night, as far as I know. That last part is the bit that kept me awake.

Who I am

My name is Naomi and I run a four-person consultancy. We help mid-sized retailers fix their supply chains, which sounds unglamorous until you realise it means we are almost never in the same country. Two of us are in the UK, one is in Poland, one moves between wherever the current project is. Our office is a shared drive, a chat app, and whatever desk is free.

For years I thought of that as the whole appeal. No lease, no commute, no arguments about the thermostat. What I did not think about, not once in the first three years, was that every one of those borrowed desks came with a network I knew nothing about, and that every file we opened on it was somebody else's commercial information.

The conference hotel with two Wi-Fi networks

I was in Lisbon for a trade event, three days of meetings and one evening where I needed to get a signed contract back to a client before their board met. Standard stuff. I opened my laptop in the corridor outside the ballroom because the signal was better there, and I looked at the list of available networks.

There were two that could plausibly have been the hotel's. One had an extra character in the name. I genuinely could not tell you which was which, and there was nobody at the desk at that hour to ask. I stood there long enough that a member of the cleaning staff asked if I was alright.

Is that one actually the hotel's?

I asked myself that question, could not answer it, and then connected anyway, because the contract was due. That is the honest part of this story. I did not make a careful risk assessment. I picked one, sent the file, and spent the rest of the trip with a low hum of unease that I could not turn into anything useful, because there was nothing to check afterwards. You do not get a receipt telling you whether a network was trustworthy.

What bothered me most was not that night. It was the arithmetic afterwards. Four people. Airports, cafes, co-working day passes, an apartment rental with a router nobody has touched in years. Multiply that by a year of travel and I had been quietly gambling with other people's data for a long time, and calling it flexibility.

What I tried (and why it failed)

I want to be fair to my past self here. I did try to fix this, twice, before I did anything that lasted.

• Tethering off my phone. It works, right up until you are on a foreign network with a data cap, on a video call, watching your allowance evaporate. It also solved the problem for exactly one person - me - while the rest of the team carried on connecting to whatever was nearest.
• A free VPN app I found in about ninety seconds of searching. It was slow enough that I stopped turning it on, which makes it worse than nothing, because it let me feel protected while I was not. An app you switch off on the days you are busy is not a security measure, it is a decoration.
• A written rule. I actually put a line in our internal handbook saying to avoid public Wi-Fi for client work. Nobody broke it maliciously. They broke it because the alternative was missing a deadline, which is what always happens when your security policy is a sentence instead of a tool.

The pattern is embarrassing once you see it. Every fix I tried put the burden on a tired person making a judgement call in a corridor. And that person, as established, was standing there squinting at two network names and guessing.

The turning point

I went looking properly, which for me meant reading what providers actually claim on their own pages rather than what a listicle claims for them. PureVPN's homepage opens with four words:

Secure. Fast. Global. That's PureVPN.

Which, on its own, tells you nothing - every provider says a version of that. What made me keep reading was the line underneath it, because it described a different shape of product than the one I had been shopping for. They pitch it as unifying VPN, password management, dark web monitoring, tracker blocking and data removal, so you are not juggling multiple tools.

That landed for a specific reason. I had been treating my problem as a Wi-Fi problem. It was not. It was a too-many-loose-ends problem - passwords kept in three places, no idea whether any of our work emails had turned up in a breach, four people improvising security on the road. A bundle is not automatically better than picking best-in-class tools separately, and I will come back to that. But for a team my size, where nobody is the IT department, fewer moving parts is a feature I can actually feel.

How we actually use it

Here is what the setup looks like for us now, feature by feature, and what each one is actually for in a business like mine.

The connection itself

• PureVPN state 6,000+ servers across 65+ countries, which in practice means there is usually something close to wherever any of us happens to be that week - closer generally being better for speed.
• For me: I no longer care which of the two hotel networks is the real one. The point of the tunnel is that the network underneath it stops being something I have to trust.
• They support WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2 and SSTP. WireGuard is the modern one and it is what I leave selected; the others exist for the occasional network that blocks things.
• Obfuscated servers are offered for masking the fact that you are using a VPN at all - relevant on networks that try to block VPNs outright, which I have run into at exactly one client site.

The two settings that actually made it stick

• The internet kill switch, described on their site as automatically cutting off internet access if the VPN disconnects. This is the feature that turned a good intention into a system. If the tunnel drops mid-upload, my connection drops with it, rather than quietly finishing the job in the clear while I look at my coffee.
• Split tunnelling - choosing which specific apps go through the VPN. I route the work apps and leave a couple of local things outside it. Without this I would have hit some banking or local-service annoyance within a week and uninstalled the whole thing, which is exactly how my previous attempt died.
• For me: the combination is the point. Split tunnelling stops it being irritating, and the kill switch stops it being optional.

The part that covers a whole team

• One account covers up to 10 logins, with a multi-login add-on that takes it to 50+ devices simultaneously. For four people with a laptop and a phone each, plus the odd tablet, the base allowance already covers us.
• Apps exist for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and Linux, plus browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, and TV devices like Apple TV, Android TV and Fire Stick. Our Linux holdout was the test case; nobody had to be told no.
• They also sell a VPN for Teams product with an admin panel and private gateways, which is the direction I would look if we grow past the point where I can fix things by messaging four people.
• Add-ons are available for a dedicated IP, port forwarding, a residential network and a dedicated server. We have not needed any of them, but a dedicated IP is the one I would revisit if a client ever asked us to connect from a fixed address.

The bits I did not expect to use

• The password manager. Unglamorous, and the single biggest real-world improvement for a team that used to share things badly.
• Dark web monitoring and their Remove My Data service, both part of the wider bundle rather than bolted on from another vendor.
• A tracker blocker, and DNS leak protection listed among the features - the latter being one of those things you never notice working, which is rather the point.

The honest objections

If you have read this far you deserve the caveats, not just the sales pitch.

First: a VPN is not a magic shield. It protects the connection. It does not stop somebody phishing your accountant, it does not patch your laptop, and it will not save you from a weak password on an email account. Ours sits alongside two-factor authentication everywhere and backups I actually test. Anyone selling a VPN as complete protection is selling you a story.

Second, and I want to be precise about this because it matters: I am deliberately only describing what PureVPN says on its own site, and I did not find a no-logs claim or an audit statement on the homepage itself. Logging policy is the single most important question you can ask a VPN provider, so do not take my word or a homepage headline for it - go and read their privacy documentation before you hand them your traffic, the same way you would read a supplier contract. I would rather tell you to go and check than fill the gap with something I have not verified.

Third, pricing. VPN pricing is a moving target of promotions and term lengths, and I am not going to quote you a number that expires next Tuesday. What I will say is that their site lists a 31-day money back guarantee, and that is the honest way to test any of this. A month is enough to find out whether you actually leave it switched on, which is the only question that matters.

What actually changed

I am not going to tell you our productivity went up by some percentage, because it did not, and anybody who tells you a VPN did that for them is guessing. What changed is quieter and, for me, worth more.

The corridor decision is gone. When one of us lands somewhere and opens a laptop, the sequence is connect, work, done - there is no moment of weighing up a network name against a deadline, because that judgement call has been taken out of a tired person's hands and handed to software that does the same thing every time.

The second change was one I did not anticipate. When a client's procurement team asked, in writing, how we handle their data on the road, I had an actual answer instead of a paragraph of reassuring adjectives. For a four-person firm competing against larger consultancies, being able to answer that question calmly is not a security benefit. It is a sales one.

And the third is simply that I sleep. The unease I carried home from Lisbon was not about a specific incident. It was about not knowing, and not being able to find out. That feeling has not come back.

My honest recommendation

If your business lives on other people's networks - if you are a consultant, a freelancer, a small team that travels, or anyone who has ever opened a client file on cafe Wi-Fi and hoped for the best - then the category is worth your attention regardless of which provider you pick. What made PureVPN the right shape for us specifically was the bundle: one subscription covering the tunnel, the passwords and the monitoring, across every device the four of us own, without me becoming a part-time IT manager.

Do it in this order. Read what they offer, check their logging and privacy documentation yourself rather than trusting any review including this one, then use the 31-day money back guarantee as what it is - a trial. Install it on every device on day one, not just your laptop. Turn on the kill switch. Set up split tunnelling before it annoys you. Then see whether it is still switched on four weeks later, because that, and not any feature list, is the real test.

A plain note on money: in this article we have stuck deliberately to what PureVPN states on their own site rather than inventing benchmarks, speeds or prices, because a number we made up is worth less to you than no number at all - and where we could not verify something, like their logging policy, we have said so instead of glossing over it. If you buy through a link here we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change a word of what gets written, and if you would rather go straight to their site, that is completely fine by us.

- Naomi