....
I've found that if you get a node with crap performance, you can destroy the node, get your account credited, then rebuild the node elsewhere. In all, it costs ~$0.65 to destroy and rebuild, but getting 35% more performance is worth it.
Not bad at all ... the CPU is at least quite recent and it has loads of cache available, you should get around ~1.3 chains per day.
You'd think so. As pointed out previously, the chains/day stat is for finding a chain with length equal to the integer part of the difficulty. It'll be less than that once you take into consideration the fractional part. (Please correct me if I'm wrong)
I do average about 0.90 to 1.00 chains/day metric on each of the nodes though. Even if it's less than half of what's reported, as long as I hit ~2 blocks on each node, they pay for themselves.
As a side note, don't count on being able to use the CPU cache to full efficiency. It is shared hardware after all.
