That's a decent idea about running a VPS for a bitcoind relay. I could stick p2pool on there too while I'm at it.
I like this idea of a VPS with the p2pool and bitcoind nodes on it. Will probably be trying that in the new few days. Anyone else have any tips on doing it?
Many of the public P2Pool nodes do just this. However if that person's P2Pool instance goes down, your miners will stop. Hopefully you have a backup pool configured, but you'd be surprised how many people don't do this.
I have setup a giant cluster of P2Pool instances. You can mine with us using credentials just like any other pool. However on the backend, everything is running P2Pool. Everything is also load balanced for failover and high availability. As of now things are running with zero fee's, and my plan is to add merged mining eventually to cover operational costs.
Check us out @
http://p2pool.io