It’s very common for brands to focus on one application with their products. Nike, for example, is known for their sportswear but has slowly transitioned into becoming a name for all types of clothing. The same logic applies to digital products, such as proxy servers.
If a brand has concentrated on one use case for quite a while and suddenly switches to another, you should take it as a serious sign of quality change. That’s exactly what happened with Rayobyte. Their shift from marketing-focused proxies to a universal provider should concern you.
What is Rayobyte (BlazingSEO)?
Rayobyte entered the market in 2015 under the name Blazing SEO. This implies that their infrastructure was built mainly for one use case: collecting data for search engine optimization purposes.
Usually, this encompasses scraping search engine results pages for rankings, checking on competitor websites, and other marketing tasks.
Their pool of IPs—over 300,000 data centers and over 100,000 residential IPs—should already have a history of being used by marketers. This is not necessarily a drawback; the IPs might be tested to work for such purposes.
However, many of them might be banned for abusing such activity. Other websites might easily follow if a giant such as Google already flags your IPs.
The company fights such a bad image by branding the service as open and ethical. Their blog and customer support are extremely helpful in providing honest answers about their infrastructure.
Speed tests support their aims, as there is no reason to think that Rayobyte has slower proxies than competitors. The same goes for Location targeting – they cover all crucial regions, and the IP counts are more or less evenly distributed.
Prices
Overall, Rayobyte proxies are moderately priced. You can’t say they are expensive, but many Rayobyte alternatives offer lower prices for a similar user experience. The list below will give you some idea about their pricing. However, keep in mind that Rayobyte tends to change its pricing often.
Rayobyte has a pay-as-you-go option, which is very confusing, as it still limits how much traffic you need to use to get certain pricing.
- Starter – $7.50/GB for traffic from 1GB to 15GB
- Personal – $6.50/GB for traffic from 16GB to 49GB
- Consumer – $6.50/GB for traffic from 50GB to 99GB
Subscription plans are named similarly but require a fixed monthly price for a certain amount of traffic. Unlike pay-as-you-go options, you won’t be able to exceed the limit.
- Starter – $100/mo or $6.67/GB for 15GB of traffic
- Personal – $250/mo or $5/GB for 50GB of traffic
- Consumer – $450/mo or $4.5/GB for 100 GB of traffic
Many other plans are on offer, but these are the main ones and should give you an idea of the mid-price range that Rayobyte proxies fall into.
Advantages or Rayobyte
- Performance: there is no reason to think Rayobyte’s proxies are slower than competitors.
- Customer support: Many users praise it as down-to-earth and helpful when solving issues.
- Free trial: conditions depend on the proxies you choose. The residential proxy free trial is bandwidth-limited.
- All major proxy types: mobile, residential, data center, and ISP proxies with decent IP counts.
Drawbacks of Rayobyte
- Rayobyte’s refund policy could be better. You won’t get a refund if you purchased proxies and don’t like them. At least, that’s the user consensus on platforms like Trustpilot.
- SOCKS5 support is lacking with most of the proxies Rayobyt has on offer. It’s already a market standard and should be implemented if the provider wants to be a major player.
- The prices of Rayobite proxies are quite high, and frankly, the whole scheme is confusing for first-time buyers. Many alternative providers take a better approach.
- Rayobyte’s use case limitations are still present, and these proxies are best for SEO purposes. However, the company is investing largely in web scrapers and other tools.
IP legitimacy
IP address legitimacy refers to how well the proxy is viewed by websites and how it is sourced. Both factors can influence the performance of your proxy connection and whether you will face many restrictions.
We already discussed how Rayobyte proxies were used exclusively for SEO tasks and how this might lower their legitimacy. Unfortunately, the problem goes deeper than that, and there are other concerns even after the name change.
For example, some allegations are that Rayobyte IPs are used for DDoS attacks and other malicious purposes. It’s especially bad for their data center proxies since if some IPs are flagged this way, it’s likely that the whole group might get banned.
It’s also speculated that they contact application owners and developers under the name of their IP address-sourcing app, Cashraven. They offer developers the ability to include code that allows them to access users’ IPs and source proxies. It’s a good monetization option for developers but rarely benefits the apps’ users.
The exact implementation isn’t widely known and may differ from case to case, but it needs to inspire more confidence. If a completely unrelated app user’s bandwidth is used for proxies, the quality will not be the best. It also could be more ethical since people rarely read terms and conditions.
These speculations don’t create a good image of the legitimacy of Rayoyte proxies’ IP addresses. Of course, similar considerations can be made about other providers, but it’s better not to take your chances and choose someone with a cleaner slate.
Conclusion
While the Rayobyte proxies are of decent quality and moderately priced, their application to other use cases may be limited. Some may worry that Rayobyte’s IPs are already flagged, and it’s better not to take your chances with important automation or web scraping projects. Our recommendation is to use them only with a good discount.
