Announcement: Our May 2023 IP Migration, And Why It Matters

Hello 👋

My name is Neil Emeigh, and I’m the founder and CEO of Rayobyte.

Today I’m writing to share some exciting news that will greatly improve our already award-winning data center and ISP proxy service. It’s such an important step for us that I’m taking the time to write about it personally! However, the cost of this improvement will be short-term inconvenience to many customers.

First, a little context. When I founded this company in 2015, I did so out of a personal need and frustration. I myself was using proxies for SEO (hence our company’s original name, “Blazing SEO”) and all the data center providers at the time either had awful customer support or awful uptime. Many had both! Eventually I had enough and proclaimed I wanted to build a better data center proxy service. 💪  

I began that journey eight years ago by reaching out to some ISPs to see if they would lease me IPs in bulk and put them on servers in their facilities. I had no idea what I was doing, but was blessed to work with a great sysadmin that knew how to configure a proxy on a barebone server. From then onward, we used this model to build the world-class proxy network that exists today. Unlike those original data center providers, our network has always prioritized:

• Subnet diversity
• Quality of the IP (not being banned on target sites)
• Uptime
• Customer service

You can learn more about how we source our IPs from my presentation at Zyte’s Extract Summit 2022 here.

Unfortunately, microdecisions over the past years have led our company, under my leadership, to make decisions that slowly sacrificed quality so that we could earn a little more profit. No one decision was major, but the culmination of them all over many years have gotten us to where we are today. I’m proud to say that we’re still one of the highest rated data center providers according to the latest industry report from Proxyway, but our quality doesn’t meet the same standards that I founded the company on.

I take full responsibility for this, and I am committed to getting back to our roots of giving you, the customer, the best damn customer experience possible.

With this renewed commitment, we are putting our company through the pain of unwinding some of those microdecisions over the years that compromised our high standards. One of those initiatives is to move our customers off of our lowest quality IPs, and move them onto higher quality IPs. Our low quality leased IPs cost us around 30% less than our high quality self-owned IPs, but they’re regularly plagued with minor outages and low quality ban scores against target websites – the same problems I myself faced back in 2015, and swore would never plague Rayobyte’s customers.

So here’s what is changing:

1. We will be migrating some of our customers’ IPs to higher quality IPs starting on Monday, May 22nd at 8 AM CST.
2. Prices will NOT be affected
3. These customers will experience a higher uptime
4. These customers will have greater success on their target websites

We recognize the inconvenience this may cause some of you who have these IPs built into your workflows, and we are deeply sorry. But I am confident that the improved success you see on all target sites – again, with zero price increases – will make up for the short-term headache.

And since these IPs are solely owned by us, you will no longer be forced by upstream providers to switch IPs or have outages because of issues on their services, which means fewer migrations in the long run!

To help make the migration as painless as possible, you may request replacements in your dashboard starting today up until the date of our final migration. Customers with low-quality IPs will receive an email with the IPs they need to replace – simply copy those from the email, paste them into your dashboard, and receive new IPs from our higher-quality network in minutes.

If you choose not to migrate manually, we will automatically give you new IPs on the final migration date.

This guide shows the process in detail, and our world-class customer service team can be reached using the live chat on this very page if you have additional questions or concerns.

Once more, I greatly apologize for the inconvenience this may cause, and for allowing the low-quality IPs that require this migration in the first place. I appreciate your understanding and support, and thank you all for being a continued customer of Rayobyte.