Full definition
There are two flavors of rotation. Provider-side rotation means you hit one gateway endpoint (e.g., `gate.smartproxy.com:7000`) and the provider picks an IP for you on every request. This is the easy mode — most providers default to this.
Manual rotation means you fetch a list of IPs from the provider's API (e.g., 100 IPs at a time), and your code picks which one to use for each request. This gives you full control: stick with one IP for a session, retry with a different IP after a failure, weight by latency or geography.
Manual rotation matters when: you need precise session control (sticky sessions across multi-page workflows), you want to retry intelligently (try IP A, fail, try IP B from same country), or you're doing distributed scraping (multiple workers should not all pick the same IP). For simple high-volume scraping, provider-side rotation is fine.