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 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.

The datacenter proxies were fast enough for most tasks, including streaming high definition videos. They shouldn’t hold you back.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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

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 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

Datacenter & ISP dashboard Residential dashboard

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.

The dashboard’s main screen.

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.

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 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.

The proxy setup.

If the proxy server supports it, the dashboard allows choosing a particular city within the country it’s located. 

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.

Proxy Management API

The dashboard also has 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 wary 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.

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.

The dashboard’s main page.

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.

Buying bandwidth.

Replenishing the balance..

Viewing the billing history.

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.

The proxy setup widget.

Usage Tracking

Rayobyte provides a graph that shows traffic use during last month in kilobytes. For now, it’s not possible to select different time ranges or change the unit of measurement.

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.

Proxy Pilot

Proxy Pilot is a middleware tool for Rayobyte’s proxy networks. It performs two functions:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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. 

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.