Hello everyone.

Just recently I've come across funding and some very intrigued investors to help us (co-worker and I) with a mining operation start up.

We will be ordering 200 S9 miners when the next batch becomes available, hopefully around January.  In the mean time my curiosity has been sparked with the mining calculator profitability.

I've mined in the past with old S3 and S5 equipment, but calculating the hashrate on coinwarz or any other mining calculator site for that matter, how accurate is it to realized profit and losses at the end of the day? I see some of them saying we'd be making some very decent returns daily. I've factored in a difficulty increase of roughly 4% every 2 weeks and would still be making generous returns. I'm just curious as to whether or not we would actually come close to those profit margins according to a mining calculator?

We'd like to eventually start solo mining, but with 2.7Ph/s starting out we don't feel like it is a whole lot of mining power to efficiently mine solo and turn a profit at the end of the week.

If we were to mine with a pool (Slush preferred) would we be making close to the same amount of returns as the mining calculator predicts? I understand how the hashpower to pool ratio works and all, but is there a mining pool calculator that would help with the clarity of finding a more accurate return?

If anyone would like to play devils advocate as well it is more than welcome. We are very passionate about Bitcoin and have been working towards starting an operation for months now. With it finally starting to take shape we'd appreciate any feedback or help with getting started up

Thank you