Rayobyte (former Blazing SEO) Review

General Information

Rayobyte is a US-based proxy provider established in 2015. It belongs to the Sprious group, which offers web scraping, data intelligence, and hosting services.  

Rayobyte’s main product is dedicated datacenter proxies. Lately, the company has been branching out to ISP, residential, and mobile proxies as well. Other than proxies, you can get a general-purpose web scraping API with data parsing capabilities for Google and Amazon. 

Before its rebranding in July 2022, Rayobyte was known as Blazing SEO. True to its name, the company started out targeting search engine marketers. Back in 2015, it had already laid out many of the building blocks that made the company successful. The IPs were on fast 1 Gbps lines; you could get them delivered and replaced nearly instantly; and they cost well below what people expected to pay for dedicated proxies – from $1.2 to as little as $0.65 per IP. 

There was also the human factor. The owner, Neil, would personally frequent online forums. He’d answer questions and help people solve issues in an honest and no-nonsense manner. This inspired confidence and propped up the still new service. 

Since then, Rayobyte has scaled up significantly. Its network of datacenter proxies now reaches 300,000 IPs throughout nine ASNs, hosted in self-owned data centers. It’s enough for Rayobyte to call itself the “largest American proxy provider”. The other products still have ways to go – Rayobyte has only begun building its own residential IP pool via bandwidth-sharing app Cash Raven. 

Nowadays, the company puts a lot of effort into highlighting openness and ethicality (you can read Neil’s opinion piece on ethicality here or watch our interview here). It’s also repositioned to be more enterprise-friendly, betting big on clients that need a trustworthy provider of proxy infrastructure (or, in their own terms, a proxy partner). And even though Rayobyte has lost some of its pricing edge, the current pricing plans still accommodate all customers wanting to try out the service.

Rayobyte Datacenter Proxies

According to Rayobyte, it controls over 300,000 datacenter IPs. You can get lists of shared, dedicated addresses, or IPs that periodically rotate, depending on your budget and needs.

The proxies are spread around 20,000 C-class subnets throughout nine different ASNs, ensuring a diverse variety of addresses that’s less likely to get mass banned. Few providers can match this scale, aside from proxy giants like Oxylabs and Bright Data. 

Rayobyte stresses that it has end-to-end control over the hardware. This should mean quicker troubleshooting and ability to fine-tune the service to your needs.

Features

Three options with very few limitations. 

You can get dedicated IPs in 27 countries. Many of the proxies will be in the US, but you can also choose from a fair number of Western European, Southern American, and Southeast Asian countries. The semi-dedicated proxies support nine locations (US, Brazil, Western Europe), and the rotating ones only three (US, Germany, Brazil). In some countries (mainly the US), you can further specify a city. 

The service is pretty much unlimited: it doesn’t impose restrictions on threads, traffic, or domains (as long as you’re good with the terms of service). Some other providers like MyPrivateProxy limit the number of threads to 100.

If you choose the rotating plan, you’ll get access to a backconnect gateway server with different ports. It will grant you a proxy pool with 20 times the number of ports you buy: 2,000 IPs for 100 ports, and so on. After 10-100 minutes, the IP address behind the gateway server will change.

The semi-dedicated and dedicated proxies come in a list and don’t rotate. You can opt to refresh the full list after the billing cycle for free. Alternatively, you can refresh individual IPs whenever you like. This also costs nothing, as long as the number of monthly refreshes remains within your plan’s size. 

Be aware that the system automatically chooses proxies from various subnets based on your location preferences. You can then replace the ones that don’t work until you find a subnet that manages to complete the job. So, it’s pretty much a trial-and-error approach. It’s possible to choose one location when buying a plan.

Pricing Plans

Accessible for users of all sizes but the plans are very broad.

Rayobyte’s datacenter proxies use a subscription-based pricing model. You can get proxies for a month, three months, six months, or a year. The longer you subscribe, the cheaper it gets, up to a 15% discount for a year’s commitment.

The datacenter proxies are priced by IP address, with the exception of rotating datacenter proxies, which charge for ports. There are four plans that cover ranges of IPs; as with duration, each plan offers a larger discount:

The third factor to influence the price is IP location. Proxies in the US are generally cheaper than in other countries, likely because Rayobyte finds them easier to source. At its worst, the difference in price can reach 75% (US versus Australian dedicated proxies).

Overall, the plans can be pretty affordable if you fall into the lower range, for example, 105 IPs. However, they’re so broad that at 900 IPs you’ll still be paying the same price. At this point, the value dives.

It’s also interesting that the dedicated proxies actually used to cost less than they do now. A few years ago, you could get 5 proxies for $6, which translates to merely $1.2/IP. It looks like Blazing SEO’s investments in infrastructure and company growth took a toll on the price.

It’s hard to compare the rotating proxy plans, as other providers tend to offer them by traffic (e.g. Smartproxy and Bright Data) or give access to the full pool and limit the number of parallel connections (Storm Proxies).

Performance Benchmarks

Aced our tests.

We last tested Rayobyte dedicated proxies for 2022 Proxy Market Research. The plan included 100 IPs in the US.

We made 1,500 connection requests to each of seven high-profile websites. We also measured the proxy connection speed by running a DigitalOcean speed test.

Rayobyte’s proxies performed very well and had no issues competing with premium providers. The IPs we received hadn’t been abused by any of the target websites, and they were connected to a fast internet line. Overall, we were pleased with what we received.

You can see the performance with individual targets below:

Verdict

Rayobyte’s datacenter proxy service is large and diverse enough to be a viable option all users of all sizes. The IPs we received performed great, and they have very few limitations. The pricing plans don’t require buying much, but they can also scale to thousands of IPs if needed. However, you should be aware of the automated IP distribution system, and that the plans get be pretty expensive if you end up on the higher end of their broad ranges.

Rayobyte ISP Proxies

Rayobyte’s ISP proxies are like a stripped-down version of the datacenter service. This isn’t necessarily bad – it just means that the provider hasn’t had the time to bring the service up to a similar scale. It also owes to the fact that ISP proxies are much harder to source. 

In July 2021, their network included 3,000 US proxies from three different ASNs. A year later we have no IP count to compare, but both the number of ASNs and countries has expanded. 

Like with datacenter proxies, you can choose to share the IP with several other people or buy addresses dedicated to your personal use. Rayobyte recently introduced a third option that resembles NetNut’s approach (a pool of rotating addresses). But it’s still very new and the information is lacking. 

Features

Pretty much unlimited if you’re fine with the few locations.

Compared to Rayobyte’s datacenter proxies, or premium competitors like Oxylabs and Bright Data, the location coverage is skimpy. It’s either the US, UK, or Germany – or only the first one if you go with shared IPs.

The last time we tried, it wasn’t possible to choose particular cities – especially via self-service. There might be an option to get several different cities if you ask now, but I wouldn’t bet on the variety to be high.

Rayobyte currently advertises eight ASNs, including such consumer internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon. For our tests, we received Verizon IPs, so we have little reason to doubt this claim.

As Rayobyte finds ISP proxies harder to source, you won’t be able to replace them for free. So use them carefully.

Pricing Plans

No need to invest much but the price per unit is expensive. 

Rayobyte’s ISP proxy plans follow a very similar structure compared to the datacenter proxies. They charge for IPs, and subscribing for longer gives you a bigger discount (up to 8%). They also have the same pricing tiers:

1. Starter (5-99 IPs),
2. Personal (100-999 IPs, 4% cheaper),
3. Corporate (1,000-4,999 IPs, 8% cheaper), and
4. Enterprise (>5,000 IPs, 30% or more cheaper).

Overall, these proxies are significantly more expensive than Rayobyte’s datacenter addresses: they start from $5 for a dedicated IP, and half that for a shared one. However, they’re also much harder to source and perform better.

There are two more differences. One for the worse: the discounts here are much skimpier, and one for the better: with the ISP proxies, all locations cost the same.

Performance Benchmarks

Impeccable.

We last tested Rayobyte’s ISP proxies in summer 2021. We received 100 IP addresses in the US spanning three subnets.

All of the IPs were registered under Verizon, as promised. One of the ranges appeared as commercial instead of residential, but that didn’t cause any issues.

We used the proxies to access 11 high-profile websites. We also measured the proxy connection speed by running a DigitalOcean speed test.

Overall, both the success rate and response time were impeccable. Out of the few errors, most of them were “no response”, which means that the proxy connection dropped or the site closed it before it could complete. The download speed could’ve been faster, but it’s still good enough even for streaming.

You can find the results with individual websites below:

Finally, we ran a stress test to evaluate the proxy server infrastructure. It had no issues whatsoever with hundreds of connection requests per second:

Verdict

Rayobyte’s ISP proxies are limited in terms of location coverage but pretty much unlimited in everything else. They performed very well and should be under your consideration if you need stable quality IPs. Just note that these proxies may have limited stock if you’re considering them for large-scale use.

Rayobyte Residential Proxies

Rayobyte’s residential proxies are pretty new, so it’s a good idea to treat them as a beta-level product for now. The provider sources IPs via a proxyware app called Cash Raven, and it also resells other proxy suppliers. There’s a lot of emphasis on ethical proxy use with this particular service, meaning that the number of supported use cases may be limited.

Features

A competent set of features for a mid-range provider. 

The service covers over 100 countries, with the ability to filter individual locations and cities. Rayobyte expects to bring ASN filtering in the future. By default the IPs rotate with every connection request; you can keep them until they go offline but there’s no way select custom rotation intervals.

Solely from the standpoint of features, it’s a competent service that can stand up to most competitors.

Pricing Plans

Questionable worth at the lower end but the plans scale very well. 

Rayobyte uses an interesting system for its residential proxies, where it’s not quite pay-as-you-go (as there’s no going), but neither a subscription. You simply buy the amount of traffic you need, and it stays there until you use it.

The cost per unit depends how much you’re willing to spend. Rayobyte has traffic ranges after which the price decreases. For example, buying between 1 and 15 GBs will cost you $15/GB, between 16 and 49 gigabytes – $12.50/GB, and so on. So, it’s a good idea to buy more in advance, even if you’re not planning to use that traffic very soon.

In relation to other mid-range and premium providers, Rayobyte compares favorably as you buy 100 GBs and more. However, the entry plans face tough competition. For example, if you need up to 15 GBs of data, both Oxylabs and Bright Data charge the same amount. It makes little sense to choose Rayobyte over them for now.

Performance Benchmarks

Robust infrastructure overshadowed by a tiny proxy pool.

We last tested Rayobyte’s residential proxies for 2022 Proxy Market Research. We ran:

• One million connection requests over 18 days using the global (unfiltered) gateway.
• 300,000 (or 50,000) connection requests over 14 (or seven) days for each of seven high-value location gateways.
• 1,000 connection requests to each of 10 popular websites.

Tests a) and b) used Cloudflare’s Trace tool that connects to the nearest Cloudflare data center.

What we found was a decent service. Rayobyte’s infrastructure worked most of the time, and its success rate managed to beat even premium competitors like GeoSurf and NetNut. The response time was competitive as well compared to most affordable and mid-range alternatives. However, Rayobyte couldn’t quite catch up to Bright Data, Oxylabs, or Smartproxy, all of which were twice faster. But then again, few can.

What held Rayobyte back the most was the size of its proxy pool. It was significantly smaller than any provider we tried, cheap or expensive. Throughout 14 days, we managed to get fewer than 2,000 American IPs, and the Canadian endpoint failed to return even 50 unique addresses. At this point, providers like Smartproxy are hundreds of times larger.

That said, the residential proxies did well with popular websites. They managed to open Google and Amazon over 90% of the time, which shows that the proxy pool was clean when we tested it.

All in all, it’s a pretty good proxy network, but it may not be viable for large-scale tasks or work with less popular locations.

Verdict

Rayobyte’s residential proxies are still a beta-level service. Despite solid performance and clean IPs, the proxy network is too small for any serious use. The pricing is also barely competitive at the entry level, though it does outscale most premium and mid-range providers. The good news is that the traffic never expires, so you can buy some in advance and ease into the service as it grows.

Rayobyte Mobile Proxies

Rayobyte’s mobile proxies use one of the more unique formats I’ve seen. The last time we tried them, they were based on dedicated devices rather than a peer-to-peer network.

Normally, such services are sold to social media managers. They have no traffic limits and focus on providing one IP at a time that you can rotate at will. Here, however, the IPs rotate with high frequency, making them suitable for web scraping but not much else.

Rayobyte constantly restarts the devices, forcing mobile carriers to assign them a new address. This creates an interesting scenario: you’ll quickly deplete IPs if you scrape in short bursts; however, the proxy pool becomes pretty large throughout longer stretches of time. As a result, the service is best suited for web scraping specialists that work on a smaller scale.

Rayobyte plans to gradually introduce peer-to-peer IPs into the pool. It might have started doing so, but we haven’t had the chance to verify this.

Features

Many constraints for now.

The service is pretty barebones. Basically, it provides access to US-based devices with SIM cards that change IP with every new connection request. In theory, you can establish as many parallel connections as you like, though in reality you’ll want to pace yourself due to aforementioned peculiarities.

Pricing Plans

Cheaper than most bandwidth-based alternatives.

The mobile proxy plans are based on a subscription model. At $50, they have the steepest entry price out of Rayobyte’s all products. They’re also the most expensive per unit.

However, while a starting rate of $25 per gigabyte may sound like a lot, it’s actually cheaper than most similar services. Bright Data charges $40/GB, and SOAX, a mid-range provider, starts from $33/GB. So Rayobyte’s pricing is not bad at all when put into context.

Performance Benchmarks

A sizable proxy pool over longer periods brought down by lacking performance.

We last tested Rayobyte’s mobile proxies for 2022 Proxy Market Research. The tests included:

• 150,000 connection requests over 14 days using the US gateway. We targeted Cloudflare’s Trace tool.
• 1,000 connection requests to each of 10 popular websites.

If you don’t need many unique IPs within a short timeframe, these dedicated devices actually work out. Throughout 14 days of testing, Rayobyte managed to return nearly 15,000 unique US IPs – more than both SOAX and Bright Data, both of which advertise millions of proxies under their belts.

The problem was that the proxies simply didn’t perform well. Even when targeting Cloudflare’s Trace tool, which is always near the IP and weighs only a few kilobytes, nearly 12% of the requests timed out. What’s more, the average response time was 7 seconds – twice slower than SOAX or Bright Data, and four times slower than Oxylabs.

What happened when we tried to access real targets like Amazon and Craigslist? Every third to second request timed out. Improvements are sorely needed in this area.

Verdict

Rayobyte’s mobile proxies have a unique set of constraints and seem almost like a proof of concept. What might draw you in is the price, though you should always be aware that the service is suited for web scraping only.

User Experience

Polished user experience that puts a lot of power into your hands.

Note that most of this section applies to Rayobyte’s datacenter and ISP proxies only. The residential and mobile products require filling in different forms, and they have separate dashboards. We haven’t had the chance to try them out yet.

Registration

To register with Rayobyte, you have to complete a lengthy form. The registration is paired with purchase, so even if you opt for a trial, you’ll need to select a package, location, and amount of IPs to buy.

After filling in the form, you’ll be able to access the dashboard. The IPs should arrive automatically within 30 minutes after purchase, if they’re in stock. 

Dashboard

Rayobyte’s dashboard includes everything needed to work with proxies. You can buy a plan, authorize and manage the proxy servers, view invoices, and contact support. You won’t find any usage metrics, but with no bandwidth limits, they’re pretty irrelevant.

The dashboard’s main screen.

Proxy Management

To set up the proxy server, you first need to authorize access. One way to do it is via an IP address, another via a username and password. The SOCKS5 protocol and rotating proxies support IP authentication only. 

After you’ve authenticated, you can simply copy proxies from a list of addresses on the dashboard. It’s nice that you can see the location associated with each address. You can export the list if needed, but the output format will no longer display the location of the IPs. There’s also a homemade tool for filtering out bad IPs – a convenient touch.

The proxy setup.

If the proxy server supports it, the dashboard allows choosing a particular city within the country it’s located. I had the option to do this with the US dedicated proxies but not the ISP addresses.

Choose your preferred city.

If an IP doesn’t work the way you want it, you can replace it. Simply hit a button, and within 30 minutes, a new one will appear in the old one’s place. Or, enter a list of proxies into the text field to substitute them en masse. A replacement is available once every 30 days.

Let’s get rid of this one, don’t want that one… This one I’ll keep.

Finally, there’s a tab called Proxy Settings/API. There, you can do four things:

1. Substitute an IP if it goes down. This ensures 100% uptime, but personally I’d be a little weary to give up my hand-picked proxies to an automated system
2. Rotate the static proxies after 30 days.
3. Export the data about your account (including the billing info).
4. Access the API. It allows authorizing, viewing assigned IPs by country or category, replacing and adding/removing proxies – all programmatically.

Welcome, programmers. Enjoy.

Subscription Management

Rayobyte supports full self-service for its datacenter and static ISP proxy plans. There is no wallet functionality, meaning that any change to the subscription will require a new transaction. Rayobyte lists invoices in a separate tab called Billing.

Another interesting feature – particularly because you can do it on your own – is upgrading or downgrading a plan. Simply enter the number of IPs you want to add or discard, and the system will make the changes for you. No need to contact support. Just note that you can only beef up your existing plan this way: it doesn’t seem possible to add German IPs if you have a US-based package.

Gimme more.

Finally, you can request to cancel the service through the dashboard. It will ensure that subscription won’t renew after the 30 day billing period.

Proxy Pilot

Proxy Pilot is Rayobyte’s tool for the residential proxy service. It performs two functions:

1. It rotates static proxy lists.
2. It outfits the proxy server with advanced proxy management logic, such as automatic retries, cooldowns, and ban detection. This turns “dumb” IPs into an intelligent service like Zyte’s Smart Proxy Manager or Oxylabs’ Next-Gen Residentials. 

For now, Proxy Pilot comes free of charge. So, if it works well, it can create a lot of value for Rayobyte’s proxies, making them very cost-efficient. Or, at least reduce some web scraping induced headaches. 

The issue with Proxy Pilot in its current form is that it needs to decrypt passing traffic like a man-in-the-middle-attack. This sounds intimidating and requires a level of trust that not everyone would be willing to give to a proxy provider. On the bright side, opening up to Rayobyte will get you really detailed usage statistics.

Documentation

To keep you informed about its services, Rayobyte has an arsenal of guides in text and video formats. They’re peppered throughout the dashboard in strategic positions; but you can also access the guides in one place, by visiting Rayobyte’s knowledge base. The informational content does a great job answering common questions you might encounter. 

That said, the documentation is biased toward the datacenter and ISP services. What’s more, some of the categories seem to overlap, thus creating confusion, and the large number of guides in this case hinders discoverability.

Customer Support

If you find yourself with technical issues – or just wanting some human contact – Rayobyte offers 24/7 customer support. You can contact it via email, ticketing system, or live chat. During my writing of this review, the live chat functionality didn’t work.

The main ways of contacting support.

I tried reaching out via the ticketing system. It took me roughly two hours to receive a reply, which came at around 3AM for the customer success agent. Our conversation went back and forth several times; and while the answers were direct and competent, each further response took a similar time (2 hours) to arrive, even after the agents changed shifts. I suppose they didn’t treat my questions as urgent technical issues – which they weren’t. 

Conclusion

Gone are the days when Neil sat in forums answering questions about a freshly-baked proxy service. Rayobyte has grown into a bustling company with over 30 people. 

If you need dedicated datacenter proxies, Rayobyte can give you several strong reasons to choose it over the competition: perhaps not always the price, but definitely its flexibility and hands-on approach. 20,000 subnets are nothing to scoff at, even if the system that distributes them requires some trial and error. 

The marketing front (ethics and all the light metaphors) looks very compelling as well, whether you’re a part-time web scraper or an enterprise looking to scale its data collection efforts. 

Once you pick out what you need, the proxies perform great. There were some issues with IP databases, but Rayobyte is aware and trying to solve them. We were especially impressed with the ISP addresses, though their availability might be limited until the service scales. 

On the user experience side, the provider gives a lot of control to customers and makes sure to help every step of their journey with extensive documentation. The customer support lacks a live chat, but I was told it was temporary. 

Overall, Rayobyte is a strong datacenter proxy provider, whether you need five or five thousand IPs. Its new ISP proxies show great promise as well, especially if they’ll continue to come from major consumer ISPs. As for the beta products (rotating residential proxies, Proxy Pilot), it’s still too early to tell.