Pool business is very hard.
I currently have 2(3) pools running. One in Europa and one in China.
For now it was negative profitable, because dedicated server costs much.
You cant offer a pool that is running on your raspberry xD
To slow to sync network and send blocks fast to network. Which is a very importand thing!
So a good dedicated server costs about ~80€/Month. Next I am using a good cloudserver for database and a server for web.
A good pool hardware costs about 100€/Month.
Then you have only one mining node, without backup fallbackup, nothing.
So you need 8GH/s on Ethereum if you charge 1% fee to pay the hardware.
And thats not easy to find such Hashrate for a new pool. I spend a lot of time on forums, chats, talking with people.
If you hit that point you make profit, but for that you will have spend many days ^^
For now I have a good hashrate (13GH/s + 20GH/s + 0.5GH/s), but I also have to pay 4 dedicated and 3 cloud servers.
So at the end of the month there is not much remaining.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with running a mining pool. If it's too much work involved, then I think that I may not be able to achieve this all by myself, thus I would be needing a team to accomplish this task. As for the Raspberry Pi, I had the feeling that it was not enough for the mining pool considering the number of users, performance needed, and many other factors. That is why, I'm going to need a powerful system to get up and running.
Also, I'm considering into getting a VPS for this, instead of maintaining the hardware at home, which would save me a lot of time and effort.
I encourage you to give it a try but don't expect it to make any serious profit for you. It will be a good experience for you as you already have the hardware which you are planning to test and you don't need to pay for electricity. I haven't had any experience in running a pool but I heard that it is not easy to do and profit is not much.
Thanks for the tip. In the meantime, I would just do it for fun and learning, until I get the necessary hardware and team, to be able to make a stable mining pool capable of handling many users, and traffic. The good thing that I have is the free electricity, but it won't last for long.
Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to grow my knowledge about mining pools, as time goes by.