Rayobyte Review
Rayobyte’s datacenter and ISP products give compelling reasons to choose them, but the other services and user experience need work.
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Rayobyte has built an impressive infrastructure of datacenter proxies. Pretty much unlimited and well kept, they send a strong statement both to mid-range and premium proxy competitors.
But Rayobyte’s ambitions don’t end here: the provider has expanded its line-up to cover most proxy types. You may now choose from non-expiring residential proxies or static addresses from major ISPs. The company tries to further sway your feelings by mentioning its American roots and positioning as an ethical proxy partner.
Should you fall for it? Rayobyte’s improvements since 2022 have earned it our Greatest Progress award. But the industry isn’t standing still, either. So let’s find out how the company compares to the biggest players like Bright Data and Smartproxy.
News about Rayobyte
- By Adam Dubois
- Provider News
- By Adam Dubois
- Provider News
- By Adam Dubois
General Information
Country | United States |
Founded | 2015 |
Proxy networks | Datacenter (shared, dedicated, rotating) Residential |
Web scrapers | General-purpose API with Google & Amazon parsers |
Other tools | Proxy Pilot |
Price range | Mid-range |
Starting price | $5 |
Payment methods | Credit card, PayPal |
Trial | Available for most products |
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.
Rayobyte was initially 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.
When it rebranded in July 2022, Rayobyte had scaled up significantly, enough to call itself the “largest American proxy provider”. The company put 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 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).
In June 2024, Rayobyte decided to revisit its roots and once again focus on smaller clients. The providers now highlights real people, takes a casual tone, and emphasizes flexible access to its services.
Rayobyte Proxy Networks
Rayobyte sells all four major types of proxy servers:
- Datacenter proxies in shared, dedicated, or rotating formats and up to 30 countries to choose from.
- ISP proxies with the same formats but smaller location coverage.
- Residential proxies from around the world.
- Mobile proxies that mix USB dongles and real-user devices.
We were able to test most of the line-up. You’ll find descriptions of individual proxy types in the expandable drop-downs below:
Datacenter
According to Rayobyte, it controls over 300,000 datacenter IPs. You can get them in six different formats, including IPv6 (which is a lot!). We’ll cover four (which is still a lot but more manageable).
They are:
- Lists of shared proxies that you use alongside several other people.
- Lists of dedicated addresses you share with no one.
- Rotating proxies where you pay for ports and get access to a pool with 20 times the number of IPs: 2,000 IPs for 100 ports, and so on.
- Rotating proxies where you pay for traffic and get full access to thousands of IPs in several countries. Rayobyte doesn’t specify how large the pool is, but in our tests we found over 27,000 unique proxies.
Rayobyte’s proxies are spread throughout 20,000 C-class subnets under nine different ASNs. This ensures a variety of addresses that’s less likely to get mass banned. Few providers can match this scale, aside from giants like Oxylabs and Bright Data.
Rayobyte stresses that it has end-to-end control over the hardware. This should mean quicker troubleshooting and an ability to fine-tune the service to your needs. On the other hand, some of the ASNs are directly associated with Rayobyte, which can make it obvious where your requests come from.
Coverage
Five continents, but mostly for the dedicated IPs.
Shared | Dedicated | Rotating (/IP) | Rotating (pool) | |
Countries | 9 | 25+ | 4 | 4 |
Targeting | City-level (where available) | Country-level | ||
Distribution | One country per plan | All per plan |
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 four (US, Germany, Brazil, and France). In some countries – mainly the US – you can further specify a city.
Features
Mostly unlimited proxies with optional replacement.
Shared | Dedicated | Rotating (/IP) | Rotating (pool) | |
Rotation | Static | 10-100 mins | Every request, 2 hrs | |
Traffic | Unlimited | Plan based | ||
Concurrency | Unlimited threads | |||
Other | Free monthly & individual replacements | – |
Rayobyte’s datacenter proxies are pretty much unlimited: you get unlimited threads and, in three cases out of four, unmetered traffic.
As their name suggests, the rotating plans can automatically switch proxies without your input. The pool format is better for web scraping, as it has the option to fetch a new IP with every connection request; the other format rotates IPs every 10 minutes at the soonest.
The shared and dedicated formats don’t rotate. However, you can replace your full proxy list every month. You’re also allowed to change individuals IPs at will. This also costs nothing, as long as the number of monthly refreshes remains within your plan’s size.
Be aware that Rayobyte’s 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.
Integration & Use
SOCKS5 and both authentication methods available.
Shared | Dedicated | Rotating (/IP) | Rotating (pool) | |
Connection method | Direct | Gateway address | ||
Format | IP:Port | IP:Port | USERNAME-dc: PASSWORD-country-US @la.residential.rayobyte.com:8000 | |
Protocols | HTTP, SOCKS5 | |||
Authentication | Credentials, IP whitelist |
Rayobyte’s shared and dedicated proxies come in simple IP:Port lists. You can download these lists and integrate them into any software.
The rotating/IP product also gives you an IP address, but it’s really a gateway server: this address always remains the same, and different proxies are represented by changing port numbers.
The rotating pool uses a proper backconnect gateway where both the hostname and port remain the same. You can change the configuration (such as IP location) by adding parameters to the password.
Rayobyte supports both HTTP and SOCKS5 connections, but the latter protocol only accepts TCP traffic (no UDP).
Pricing Plans
Starting from $1/IP or $.6/GB.
Shared | Dedicated | Rotating (/IP) | Rotating (pool) | |
Model | Pay per IP | Pay per port | Traffic | |
Format | Subscription | PAYG | ||
Modifiers | Proxy location | – | ||
Starting price | $5 for 5 IPs | $12.5 for 5 IPs | $18.75 for 5 IPs | $0.6 for 1 GB |
Trial | 2-day refund | 50 MB |
Rayobyte charges for datacenter proxies either by IP, port, or traffic. Three of the four formats 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 rotating pool bases its pricing on scaling pay-as-you-go. In other words, you pre-pay for traffic, and it stays in your account until used.
In any case, Rayobyte’s plans fall into ranges: 5-99 IPs fetch one price, 100-999 are slightly cheaper per unit, and so on. These ranges can be a little too broad: paying $2.13 for a dedicated proxy is okay when getting 100 IPs but way too much when you’re buying 800.
The shared, dedicated, and rotating/IP formats also base their rates on proxy location. IPs 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).
All in all, it’s hard to evaluate whether Rayobyte’s datacenter proxies are cheap or expensive. Buying any amount of traffic for the rotating pool? In most cases, it’ll cost below the market average. Getting 10 dedicated IPs in the US? The rates will be competitive. Looking to buy 80 rotating ports? You’ll most likely be seriously overpaying.
Performance Benchmarks
#1: Download speed
We benchmarked 10 random IPs using DigitalOcean’s 100 MB NYC benchmark.
Avg. without proxies | Avg. download speed |
17.49 MB/s | 7.87 MB/s |
#2: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US proxies and a non-headless Python scraper. Our computer was located in Germany. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
Success rate | Avg. response time | |
Amazon | 91.28% | 3.09 s |
Homedepot | 98.97% | 1.32 s |
Walmart | 100% | 1.43 s |
Total | 96.83% | 1.95 s |
We last tested Rayobyte’s rotating datacenter proxy pool in March 2024.
#1: Infrastructure performance
We ran 50,000 connection requests using US-located proxies. Our computer was in the US. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
Avg. success rate | Avg. response time |
99.88% | 1.22 s |
The proxies rarely failed on their own, which is good news. However, providers like Oxylabs spoiled us with nearly perfect (99.9%) success rates.
The response time was also slow for datacenter proxies, lagging behind the fastest alternatives by nearly a second.
#2: Download speed
We tested 10 IPs using Hetzner’s 100 MB Ashburn benchmark.
Avg. without proxies | Avg. download speed | Slowest IP |
32.56 MB/s | 4.21 MB/s | 1.06 MB/s |
The IPs we tested weren’t very fast. They should be enough for browsing, less so for streaming. But knowing that Rayobyte meters traffic, it’s probably not the best product for video playback, anyway.
#3: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US proxies and a non-headless Python scraper. Our computer was located in the US. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
Avg. success rate | Avg. response time | |
Amazon | 36.24% | 3.36 s |
95.55% | 2.03 s | |
Homedepot | 88.00% | 1.80 s |
Total | 73.26% | 2.40 s |
ISP (Static Residential)
Rayobyte’s ISP proxies are like a stripped-down version of the datacenter product. 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.
Like with datacenter proxies, you can choose to share IPs with several other people or buy addresses dedicated to your personal use. Rayobyte recently introduced a third option that provides access to a network of rotating IPs. The provider doesn’t specify how large the pool is.
Coverage
Up to four countries in two continents.
Shared | Dedicated | Rotating (pool) | |
Countries | US | US, UK, Canada Germany | US |
Targeting | City-level (where available) | – | |
Distribution | One country per plan | All per plan |
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, Canada, or Germany – or only the first one if you go with shared IPs. On the bright side, it’s possible to choose particular cities; once again, the feature is available only for American addresses.
Rayobyte currently advertises nine ASNs, including such consumer internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon. We found this to be true, but note that the system assigns IPs automatically.
Features
Mostly unlimited proxies with optional replacement.
Shared | Dedicated | Rotating (pool) | |
Rotation | Static | Every request, 2 hrs | |
Traffic | Unlimited | Plan based | |
Concurrency | Unlimited threads | ||
Other | Free monthly replacements | – |
Rayobyte’s ISP proxies have very few limitations. If you choose a static or dedicated list, you can use it however you wish within Rayobyte’s terms of use.
It’s also possible to replace the proxies free of charge once per month. This feature wasn’t available earlier, so it’s a nice addition to the product.
The rotating pool’s main limitation is traffic.
Integration & Use
Either an IP list or a gateway server.
Shared | Dedicated | Rotating (pool) | |
Connection method | Direct | Gateway address | |
Format | IP:Port | USERNAME-isp: PASSWORD-country-US @la.residential.rayobyte.com:8000 | |
Protocols | HTTP, SOCKS5 | HTTP | |
Authentication | Credentials, IP whitelist |
Rayobyte’s shared and dedicated proxies come in simple IP:Port lists. You can download these lists and integrate them into any software.
The rotating pool uses a backconnect gateway address, where both the hostname and port remain the same. You can change the configuration (such as IP location) by adding parameters to the password.
Rayobyte supports the SOCKS5 protocol, but only for its static plans and without UDP.
Pricing Plans
No need to invest much, but the price per unit is expensive.
Shared | Dedicated | Rotating (pool) | |
Model | Pay per IP | Traffic | |
Format | Subscription | PAYG | |
Modifiers | – | – | |
Starting price | $12.5 for 5 IPs | $25 for 5 IPs | $7.5 for 1 GB |
Trial | 2-day refund | 10 MB |
Rayobyte’s list-based formats require a subscription. Committing to longer periods give a discount that reaches 15% for a year’s contract.
The plans have the same ranges as Rayobyte’s datacenter proxies and come with the same pitfalls – they’re too broad to be efficient. These are the tiers:
- Starter (5-99 IPs),
- Personal (100-999 IPs, 4% cheaper),
- Corporate (1,000-4,999 IPs, 8% cheaper),
- Enterprise (>5,000 IPs, 30% or more cheaper).
Overall, Rayobyte’s shared and dedicated ISP proxies cost a lot, even compared to premium providers like Oxylabs.
The rotating pool’s model is scaling pay-as-you-go: you pay for non-expiring traffic in advance, and getting more gigabytes at once ensures better rates. The price here is significantly more competitive.
Performance Benchmarks
#1: IP type
We benchmarked the IPs using the IP2Location database to see how many of them were identified as residential addresses (ISP, ISP/MOB, or MOB categories).
Residential percentage |
100% |
#2: Download speed
We benchmarked 10 random IPs using DigitalOcean’s 100 MB NYC benchmark.
Avg. without proxies | Avg. download speed |
17.49 MB/s | 13.59 MB/s |
#3: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US-filtered proxies and a non-headless Python scraper. Our computer was located in Germany. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
Website | Avg. success rate | Avg. response time |
Amazon | 92.79% | 2.82 s |
95.59% | 1.12 s | |
Homedepot | 99.81% | 0.96 s |
Walmart | 99.96% | 1.09 s |
Total | 97.04% | 1.50 s |
#1: Pool size & composition
We ran ~780,000 connection requests over 7 days using the US pool.
Unique IPs | ASNs | C-class subnets | IPs/subnet |
3,060 | 4 | 17 | 180 |
We further enriched IP data using two databases. IPinfo provided information about the ASN name and type (whether it’s a residential network). IP2Location gave us data about the business purpose of the company that owns the IP (usage type). ISP proxies often have mismatching ASN and IP owner, and this data point is relevant with some detection tools like Scamalytics.
IPs under a residential ASN | IPs under a top 10 US ASN | Usage type – ISP or MOB |
100% | 99% | 58.65% |
Rayobyte’s proxy pool wasn’t very large, but the proxies in it were of good quality. The majority came from AT&T, with Verizon and Comcast as the other top ISPs.
#2: Infrastructure performance
This benchmark shared the same parameters as the pool test. Our computer was located in Germany. We targeted a global CDN – it chose a server closest to the IP and had a response size of several kilobytes. To benchmark download speed, we used Hetzner’s 100 MB speed test.
Avg. success rate | Avg. response time | Avg. download speed (10 IPs) |
99.98% | 1.02 s | 1.43 MB/s |
The ISP proxy pool had a nearly perfect success rate. The servers were relatively slow for this proxy type but still fast enough for most uses.
Residential
Rayobyte sources its residential proxies IPs via a proxyware app called Cash Raven, and it also resells other proxy suppliers. There’s a lot of emphasis on ethics with this particular service, meaning that the number of supported use cases may be limited.
Pool Size & Coverage
Most countries with city targeting functionality.
Advertised pool size | Locations | Targeting options |
Not specified | ~180 countries | Random, country, state, city |
Rayobyte doesn’t advertise how many IPs the pool contains – the marketing materials only mention millions of proxies.
In any case, the network covers most countries around the world. You can select individual countries or go deeper and filter by state or city. Rayobyte also mentions ASN selection, but this feature is nowhere to be found.
Features
A competent set of features for a mid-range provider.
Rotation | Traffic | Concurrency | Other |
Every request 1-120 min sessions | Plan based | Unlimited threads & ports | Proxy Pilot |
By default, Rayobyte’s residential proxies rotate with every connection request. It’s also possible to establish sticky sessions that can last up to 120 mins (you can specify the duration in the dashboard).
With a session, Rayobyte rotates the IP once the time limit passes or a request fails. If you’d prefer a different behavior, the system lets you keep the IP even if a request fails by adding a special parameter.
In addition, Rayobyte includes optional software called Proxy Pilot free of charge. It enables more intelligent rotation and usage monitoring features. We cover the tool under User Experience.
Integration & Use
Both authentication methods available.
Connection method | Format | Protocols | Authentication |
Gateway address | USERNAME:PASSWORD- | HTTP SOCKS5 | Credentials IP whitelist |
Rayobyte’s residential proxies integrate using a backconnect gateway address. The address and the port never changes, and you can use multiple IPs at once or specify a location by adding parameters to the password.
In cases where credentials can’t be used, IP whitelisting is available. However, this method controls location and session parameters through headers (such as, –proxy-header “X-Rayobyte-Country: US”), which limits its usefulness.
The residential proxies support the SOCKS5 protocol, though it comes without UDP connections.
Pricing Plans
Scaling pay-as-you-go AND subscription plans.
Model | Format | Modifiers | Starting price | Trial |
PAYG Subscription | Traffic | – | $7.50 for 1 GB | 50 MB |
Rayobyte’s residential proxies use two pricing models in parallel: you can subscribe to a plan or get never expiring traffic by choosing scaling pay-as-you-go.
The first option is slightly cheaper per gigabyte but has a higher entry cost – the plans start from $99. However, the price difference isn’t as big as we’d expect it to be:
Subscription (/GB) | Pay as you go (/GB) | |
15 GB | $6.67 | $7.5 |
50 GB | $5 | $6.5 |
100 GB | $4.5 | $5.5 |
250 GB | $4 | $5 |
500 GB | $3.5 | $4 |
1,000 GB | $3.2 | $3 |
Compared to alternatives, Rayobyte costs effectively the same as its mid-market competitors: Smartproxy, SOAX, and IPRoyal.
Performance Benchmarks
Few connection errors but the proxies are slow.
We last tested Rayobyte’s residential proxies in March 2024, for the annual Proxy Market Research.
#1: Pool size & composition
Gateway | Parameters | Unique IPs | Residential %* |
Global | 1.2M req, 21 days | 523,616 | 97.04% |
US | 560k req, 14 days | 304,130 | 96.47% |
UK | 560k req, 14 days | 192,027 (61.53% in the UK) | 94.96% |
EU** | 1.2M req, 14 days | 217,681 | 94.81% |
Brazil | 560k req, 14 days | 241,155 | 96.97% |
India | 560k req, 14 days | 155,251 | 97.58% |
Australia | 140k req, 7 days | 18,648 (41.61% in Australia) | 94.43% |
* IP2Location database, Usage type data point, ISP, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs.
** Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.
#2: IP quality
We checked 20,000 proxies in the Global pool and 10,000 proxies in the US using the IPQualityScore database.
Avg. fraud score | Proxy % | Frequent abuser | |
Global | 47.39 | 50.49% | 1,742 |
US | 65.00 | 67.10% | 1,792 |
The residential proxies had average results, which shows that the proxies haven’t been abused much.
#3: Infrastructure performance
This benchmark shared the same parameters as the pool test. Our scraper was located in Germany for the Global pool, and we also had scrapers in the US and Singapore for individual country pools. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
Gateway | Avg. success rate | Avg. response time |
Global | 99.10% | 2.12 s |
US | 99.44% | 1.67 s |
UK | 99.35% | 2.15 s |
EU | 98.56% | 2.40 s |
Brazil | 99.18% | 2.70 s |
India | 98.27% | 3.29 s |
Australia | 99.14% | 2.97 s |
Rayobyte’s residential proxy network rarely failed on its own – the infrastructure success rate beat most providers, even companies like Bright Data.
However, the response time was very slow, lagging behind the fastest competitors by five times. There’s much room for improvement here.
#4: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US-filtered proxies. Our computer was located in the US. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
Website | Avg. success rate | Avg. response time |
Amazon | 93.80% | 6.59 s |
89.82% | 5.52 s | |
Social Media | 98.38% | 5.76 s |
Total | 94.00% | 5.96 s |
Despite an error here and there, the proxies opened popular websites without issues. Their response time was a little concerning, though, as other providers could handle Google in around two seconds – over twice faster.
Mobile Proxies
Rayobyte’s mobile proxies use a clever configuration: they combine dedicated devices with peer-to-peer IPs from real people. At this point, we’d say that the device-based proxies still make up the bulk of the proxy 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.
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; but 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.
Pool Size & Coverage
Few location and filtering options.
Advertised pool size | Locations | Targeting options |
Not specified | Mainly the US | Random, country |
Rayobyte fails to specify how many IPs it controls. What we do know is that the bulk are located in the US. You’re free to filter the proxy network by country, but there are no city or ASN controls.
Features
Tailored for web scraping.
Rotation | Traffic | Concurrency | Other |
Every request | Plan based | Unlimited | – |
These mobile proxies were made for web scraping: they have no thread or port limits and offer rotation with every connection request. Frankly, without sticky sessions, you couldn’t use them for much else even if you wanted to.
Integration & Use
No SOCKS5.
Connection method | Format | Protocols | Authentication |
Gateway address | Same as residential | HTTP | Credentials |
Rayobyte’s mobile proxies require a custom setup, so they take the same format as the residential proxy network. The difference is that this product supports fewer connection protocols and lacks IP whitelisting functionality.
Pricing Plans
Too expensive for what you get.
Model | Format | Modifiers | Starting price | Trial |
Subscription | Traffic | – | $50 for 2 GB ($25/GB) | – |
Unlike its other rotating proxy networks, Rayobyte’s mobile proxies require a subscription. The plans start from $50; it’s a rather steep investment at a time when most competitors offer paying as you go. The price per gigabyte is also very expensive.
In brief, Rayobyte’s mobile proxies are extremely hard to justify. We can’t recommend them in good conscience when even premium alternatives cost significantly less.
Performance Benchmarks
Slow proxies that worked well but weren't always mobile.
We last tested Rayobyte’s mobile proxies in March 2024, for the annual Proxy Market Research.
#1: Pool size & composition
Gateway | Parameters | Unique IPs | Mobile %* |
Global | 280k req, 14 days | 84,271 | 96.04% |
US | 280k req, 14 days | 103,455 | 28.75% |
UK | 280k req, 14 days | 50,953 (94.88% in the UK) | 53.43% |
EU** | 280k req, 14 days | 23,098 | 67.01% |
Brazil | 280k req, 14 days | 7,657 (87.91% in Brazil) | 34.02% |
India | 280k req, 14 days | 60,852 | 64.79% |
Australia | 140k req, 7 days | 3,654 (61.90% in Australia) | 36.84% |
* IP2Location database, Usage type data point, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs.
** Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.
#2: Infrastructure performance
This benchmark shared the same parameters as the pool test. Our computer was located in Germany for the Global pool, and we also had computers in the US and Singapore for individual country pools. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
Gateway | Avg. success rate | Avg. response time |
Random | 98.65% | 3.41 s |
US | 99.67% | 1.99 s |
UK | 99.54% | 2.24 s |
EU | 79.60% | 2.49 s |
Brazil | 99.19% | 2.64 s |
India | 98.87% | 3.52 s |
Australia | 98.81% | 3.05 s |
Rayobyte’s success rate was very high for mobile IPs. Only NetNut did better, but that provider’s pool was also questionable in terms of mobile addresses.
The same can’t be said about the response time: just like with the residential proxy network, our requests took a long time to complete.
#3: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US-filtered proxies. Our computer was located in the US. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
Website | Avg. success rate | Avg. response time |
Amazon | 97.70% | 4.98 s |
83.74% | 3.52 s | |
Social Media | 98.81% | 7.11 s |
Total | 93.42% | 5.20 s |
On the bright side, the mobile proxies opened popular targets very well. Google aside, the other two had almost perfect results.
How to Use Rayobyte
A disjointed but generally well-made experience.
This section shows what it’s like to use Rayobyte’s service, from registration to customer service.
Before we begin, I should note that the provider actually has two dashboards – one for its static datacenter and ISP proxies, and the second one for the rotating products. This complicates things and makes it seem like you’re using different services.
Registration
The registration procedure depends on which proxy type you get.
To buy datacenter or IP-based ISP proxies, 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 get residential proxies, you’ll need to enter an email and password, then confirm the registration via email. Rayobyte will automatically assign 50 MB of traffic to the account. To get more, it’s necessary to complete a KYC form which asks for a name, use case, targets, and bandwidth requirements.
Rayobyte’s beta-level products, namely its mobile and rotating ISP proxies, give you a form to fill in and ask to wait until someone contacts you.
The Two Dashboards
Rayobyte’s datacenter and ISP proxy dashboard doesn’t look very modern, but it 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 unlimited traffic makes this feature less relevant.
Subscription Management
Rayobyte supports full self-service for its datacenter and static ISP proxy plans. There’s 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.
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 Management
After you’ve authenticated via a username:password or whitelisting an IP, 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.
If the proxy server supports it, the dashboard allows choosing a particular city within the country it’s located.
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.
Proxy Management API
The dashboard also has a tab called Proxy Settings/API. There, you can do four things:
- Substitute an IP if it goes down. This ensures 100% uptime, but personally I’d be a little wary to give up my hand-picked proxies to an automated system
- Rotate the static proxies after 30 days.
- Export the data about your account (including the billing info).
- Access the API. It allows authorizing, viewing assigned IPs by country or category, replacing and adding/removing proxies – all programmatically.
Rayobyte’s decision to build a separate dashboard for residential proxies isn’t convenient, especially if you use several proxy types at once. It requires creating a new account and follows a different design language.
I do understand the reasoning, given how ingrained datacenter proxies are into the other panel, and how awkward it would’ve been to just tack on a new product. However, this dashboard also seems to service Rayobyte’s beta-level mobile and rotating ISP products – which, ironically, seem tacked on themselves in their current implementation.
In any case, the residential dashboard does its job: it lets you authorize access, set up the proxy server, track and top up balance, and access relevant help docs.
Subscription Management
Rayobyte’s residential dashboard has a separate tab with three pages for subscription management. On the first page page, you can buy traffic, but only once you go through a KYC procedure.
On the second page, you can trigger automatic top-ups after reaching a set balance threshold. It’s possible to specify by how much to top up. The feature could use improvements. There’s no wallet functionality and the system doesn’t respect your previous purchases: if you bought 100 GB at $6/GB, topping up 5 GB will cost $15/GB.
The third page is dedicated to billing history. In other words, it shows your transactions and generates downloadable invoices.
Proxy Management
Rayobyte has a widget for generating proxy lists based on the parameters you choose. These include location filtering, choosing whether to hold a sticky session, and your preferred authentication type.
Then, you can generate 10, 100, 1,000, or 10,000 endpoints in several formats. There’s also a dynamic cURL example for quickly testing the configuration.
The widget works well, but it isn’t perfect. For one, it could use integration examples in more programming languages. And it wasn’t able to properly generate a proxy list with IP whitelist selected as the authentication type.
Usage Tracking
Rayobyte provides a graph that shows traffic use in kilobytes. You can choose from multiple time periods: last month, 60, 90, 120, 150, or 180 days.
In addition, the dashboard has a page that shows the list of domains you accessed. There are four periods to choose from (last minute, hour, 24 hours, day). More frequented domains appear higher up, but you can’t see the actual number of requests made.
Finally, it’s possible to track bandwidth spend per country for either 10 days, 10-20 days, or 20-30 days. The table is on yet another page.
Proxy Pilot
Proxy Pilot is a middleware tool for Rayobyte’s proxy networks. It performs two functions:
- 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’ Web Unblocker.
- Provides detailed usage statistics with requests counts, success rates, response codes, and more.
For now, Proxy Pilot comes free of charge. 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.
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.
The documentation is very much biased toward the datacenter and ISP services. It provides the necessary information about Rayobyte’s residential proxies and skips the beta-level products entirely.
Hands-On 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.
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.
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 ISP proxies show great promise as well. As for the other products, they seem production ready but not yet at the level of top providers.
Rayobyte Alternatives
Oxylabs is a premium option with a larger proxy pool and better performance. It also offers an arsenal of web scraping tools to help you extract data easier.
Smartproxy has similar rates compared to Rayobyte, great user experience, and residential proxies that perform better. It’s a strong mid-range choice.
Bright Data offers significantly more flexibility, and it’s one of the top choices overall. Consider it if you found Rayobyte too restrictive or not scalable enough.
Recommended for:
Anyone looking for dedicated or ISP proxies.