I think the profitability of mining depends on what cryptocoin you are mining. Im currently investing in some pool mining servers for Primecoin, wich still can be profitable if you invest enough time to find cheap providers where you can have dedicated CPU cores for a relatively low price.
From my point of view I found out that you reach the best profits when you use many small machines instead of one big. I still got an i7-3770 running which makes 0.3633 Shares/hour, what means a loss of -59,07% compared to the monthly price. But on the other hand I found a host which covers its monthly price just by the default output of Shares I get. Every lucky shot within(long chains or full blocks) is pure profit for me.
But it takes a lot of research time to find optimal conditions like that. And of course it could happen that the price for XPM halves or something similar. Free enterprise is always connected with a certain risk.
From my point of view I found out that you reach the best profits when you use many small machines instead of one big. I still got an i7-3770 running which makes 0.3633 Shares/hour, what means a loss of -59,07% compared to the monthly price. But on the other hand I found a host which covers its monthly price just by the default output of Shares I get. Every lucky shot within(long chains or full blocks) is pure profit for me.
But it takes a lot of research time to find optimal conditions like that. And of course it could happen that the price for XPM halves or something similar. Free enterprise is always connected with a certain risk.