Supplier Stakeholder
- Neil Emeigh
From our Founder, Neil
Background
When I first started Rayobyte, I had no idea what I was doing. Like, nothing. I knew I used proxies, but just like we use smartphones today, it doesn’t mean we could build one ourselves 🙂. I hired our first team member from Elance, and then went to a hosting company and just asked: “Hey, can I rent a bunch of IPs from you? Don’t worry, I won’t spam them [like everyone else does].”.
Most providers at this point reply: “Yeah, sureeee… you need 100,000 IPs to do what?”, and the conversation ends there (they assume spam).
But I was fortunate to meet a kind gentleman by the name of Ernie who helped me get started. He explained some basics of proxies, guided me on the right servers I needed and how to set them up, and never took advantage of my naivety.
From that point on, I realized how dependent and important our IP suppliers are to the success of our business. If one abuse complaint were generated (it happens at the scale we operate on) and they kicked us off their network - technically within their rights in the TOS - we’d potentially lose millions. And this has, unfortunately, happened over the years. This is one of our “secret sauces” as a company: we've battle-tested as many upstream ISPs as possible to ensure we’re working with the suppliers that align with our business needs without risk to our customers.
As we’ve grown beyond our basic data center proxies and into ISP proxies, residential proxies, and mobile proxies, our Supplier needs have grown accordingly. This is why Suppliers are one of our six major stakeholders that we value equally.
Our ethos working with Suppliers
We want to create a win-win with our Suppliers, and we believe these commitments help ensure that:
What we commit to:
Abuse is a serious top priority of ours:
Look no further than our in-depth whitepaper. However, we recognize every proxy provider claims the same, but then sometimes tries to get away with things. We’re not here to pretend we’re angels - at the scale we operate, sometimes nefarious actors get by. However, that’s why we have full-time personnel, automation, and 24/7 staff that can reactively and proactively catch these situations. Just contact us - we almost never reject any blacklisting requests!
To treat you fairly, as a partner:
We want to have open and honest conversations. Our industry is plagued with a lot of shadiness, and we’re always on the lookout for partners that value trust and transparency. We will do this on our end, and ask for the same from you.
Our request from you:
No monkey business:
Too many providers have abused our partnership in the past, leading us to move on. Double-selling IPs to competitors, raising prices surprisingly on us after 5+ years in business together, threatened to kick us off due to 1 abuse complaint, and more. We’re looking for partners that value the idea of a long-term relationship that they can trust.
Work with us to make a safe network
As we commit to you on top-notch abuse protection, we ask the same from you in tolerating the nefarious actors that may slip through. Contact us and work with us to handle it, rather than threaten immediate termination. There has never been a time where we didn’t block the user and domains that were causing issues. Furthermore, we gently push our suppliers to institute stricter abuse policies on their end to reduce abuse in our overall industry. Together, we can make the proxy industry more clean!