Rayobyte has built an impressive infrastructure of datacenter proxies. Pretty much unlimited and reasonably priced, 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.
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 and mobile IP networks.
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 a fixed-size proxy pool that periodically rotates, 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 are fairly priced 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 rate. At this point, Rayobyte starts charging more than even premium providers.
It’s also interesting that the dedicated proxies actually used to cost much 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 Rayobyte’s investments into infrastructure and company growth took a toll on the price.
It’s hard to compare the rotating proxy plans, as competitors 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’s 100 dedicated US proxies in March 2023.
#1: Download speed
We benchmarked 10 random IPs using DigitalOcean’s 100 MB NYC benchmark.
The datacenter proxies were fast enough for most tasks, including streaming high definition videos. They shouldn’t hold you back.
#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.
The IPs worked very well with our e-commerce line-up, even managing to pull over 90% success rate on Amazon. This means only a few of the 100 proxies had been used with the target before we got our hands on them.
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.
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, 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.
It’s 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.
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:
- Starter (5-99 IPs),
- Personal (100-999 IPs, 4% cheaper),
- Corporate (1,000-4,999 IPs, 8% cheaper), and
- 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.
Overall, Rayobyte’s ISP proxies are among the more expensive options in the market. Other vendors, especially former sneaker proxy sellers, are able to offer quality addresses up to several times cheaper.
Performance Benchmarks
Impeccable.
We last tested Rayobyte’s 100 US ISP proxies in March 2023.
#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).
#2: Download speed
We benchmarked 10 random IPs using DigitalOcean’s 100 MB NYC benchmark.
The proxies were very fast – they almost reached our connection speed without a proxy server set up. That should be enough for streaming high definition content or other bandwidth-intensive tasks.
#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 Germany. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
Rayobyte’s ISP proxies managed to achieve a success rate of over 90% with all targets, even Google, which is a great result. Their response time was also without fault and even beat the provider’s dedicated datacenter proxies.
Rayobyte Residential Proxies
Rayobyte’s residential proxies are pretty new, so it’s a good idea to treat them as a work in progress for now. The provider sources the 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.
Features
A competent set of features for a mid-range provider.
The service covers over 100 locations, with the ability to filter individual countries 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.
It’s a good idea to get more in advance, even if you’re not planning to use that traffic very soon. There is an option to automatically buy extra at a specified threshold. But it follows the same traffic range rules, once again favoring bulk purchases.
In relation to other mid-range and premium providers, Rayobyte starts looking attractive once you buy 100 GB and more. However, the entry plans face tough competition. For example, if you need up to 15 GB 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 with some proxy pool shenanigans.
We tested Rayobyte’s residential proxies in March 2023, for the annual Proxy Market Research.
#1: Pool size & composition
We ran 1M requests over 21 days using the unfiltered pool, 500,000 requests over 14 days using the country pools, and 140,000 connection requests over 7 days using the Australian pool. We enriched IP data with the IP2Location database.
Rayobyte had a large proxy pool, but only in some locations. Its results in the unfiltered gateway and the US rivaled top competitors; however, we found fewer than 10,000 IPs in the UK and France. The raw numbers for these locations were much higher – but only every tenth IP actually came from where it supposed to (see the country pool graph below). I believe it could’ve been a configuration error on the provider’s end.
- Unfiltered pool comparison
- Residential country pool comparison
#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 pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
Rayobyte’s residential proxy network had a high and consistent success rate, no matter the location. However, these were also among the slowest proxies we tested. The latency is less noticeable in the US, but compared to something like Oxylabs, Rayobyte was four to five times slower in Europe. Overall, while we weren’t blown away by the results, they were decent.
- Success rate comparison
- Response time comparison
#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.
Pitted against real targets, Rayobyte’s residential IPs did okay. The success rate with Google actually beat the industry average, but the provided didn’t do that well with Amazon and even less so with the social media platform.
Rayobyte 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.
Features
All the basics in the box.
Rayobyte’s mobile proxy network comes with the required functionality to be useful for the majority of tasks. You can choose from over 100 countries, then further pick a state and city. The rotation options include sticky sessions, and there’re no theoretical limits on how many connections you can establish.
The two main missing features are SOCKS5 support, as well as ASN filtering.
Pricing Plans
Among the cheaper bandwidth-based services.
The mobile proxy plans follow 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.
The provider’s rates used to be cheaper than most similar services. In 2023, they still are, but with multiple competitors reducing their rates, the pricing has become dangerously close to Smartproxy and Bright Data. These companies have larger and more established proxy networks, which makes Rayobyte a tough sell.
Performance Benchmarks
An imbalanced but decently performing proxy network.
#1: Pool size & composition
We ran 280,000 requests over 14 days using the unfiltered pool and country pools, and 140,000 connection requests over 7 days using the Australian pool. We enriched IP data with the IP2Location database.
Rayobyte’s mobile proxy pool is small – throughout two weeks, we found fewer than 500 proxies in Germany and France, and only 26 in Australia. The only exception was the US, where the provider has its rotating device farms. Considering these numbers, we doubt whether you’d have a good experience selecting particular cities or even states at this point.
- Unfiltered pool comparison
- Mobile country pool comparison
#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 pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
On the brighter side, Rayobyte’s success rate was on par with premium competitors, placing it straight in the middle. Something went terribly wrong with Australia, but this seems like a exception rather than the norm. The response times, however, were the slowest of the bunch.
These results might not look impressive. But compared to 2022, the mobile proxy network has improved by leaps and bounds. It’s now perfectly serviceable for real work.
- Success rate comparison
- Response time comparison
#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.
The proxies also translated well to real targets. With the exception of Google, they were able to open most websites over 90% of the time. This is an above-average result for our web scraper.
How to Use Rayobyte
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 datacenter and ISP proxies, and the second one for the residential product. 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
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.
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.
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.
BlazingSEO is actually really good. I talk badly about a lot of random companies on the internet, but this is the first company who I feel actually does what they say (well).
The thing I like most about them is that they send bill reminders to your email, this is something stupid to like, but I thought it showed that they know their audience, and those looking for cheap fast proxies definitely wouldn’t mind a reminder before it autopays in their email.
Nothing special about these guys. They have a large presence in the web hosting / IP forums and discussion, mainly due to their spam advertising. They send regular updates about their inventory, mark up the costs of course. Not worth the money.
I don’t recommend you use Rayobyte, their system is the worst I’ve ever used, as you’ll see when you buy a proxy.