I am still surprised (and delighted of course!) to see heatpool as the #2 forger in the total list of forgers at heatnodes.org. The current effective balance is around 1.5M HEAT, with most of the times around 35 lessors.
$64K question: Would I earn more HEAT leasing it to your mega-pool than running my own node?
Well, great question but it does depend on a few things: the amount of HEAT you stake yourself and the timing on which you base this. In principle rewards should even out, so while variance is high (higher on lower stakes) overall the forging ROI should be more or less the same as bigger accounts. Even for the pool, the variance is high. In November the ROI was 4.1%, in December it will be higher due to some server upgrades and not everyone who updated yet, I will create a new report again on the site at the beginning of January to share a quick analysis of the success rate.
At least you don't have to worry about managing and maintaining your server, so especially for people who won't be able to do this or have a rather low stake (<5k HEAT for example) my service can help. I am quite active in the Slack and am doing my best to keep the server running 24/7 (using VPS). So far this has been a success in my opinion and rewards are really good I'd say.