I've been running it on 2 nodes at vps.net (originally plans were to use more nodes, but I had a pay cut in my day job, so had to cut down to 2 nodes to minimise outgoings).  You're very correct - even at just two nodes costing £28.00 (UK pounds) per month the monthly cost for those nodes has still been far more than the pool ever brought in.  

Between November and the end of April the total donations in to the pool were about 1950 litecoins (sincere thanks to those who donated).  From this, about 1168 litecoins were paid out from the pool to good causes, leaving about 782 litecoins income, which is about $1.93 or £1.25 UK pounds during that whole period .  Server costs were £168 for that November to April period.  I had been hoping litecoins may increase in value to eventually make it financially viable but unfortunately there's not much sign of that at the moment.

Running the mining op is pretty staightforward, but it's setting it up in the first place and ensuring everything works together that's the tricky bit.  With litecoin.miningpool.com this meant getting pushpool to interact with bitcoind as the "backend" and then getting a "front end" to work (user member area, stats and full working database to share out the coins properly).  I started out with simplecoin for the "front end" but ended up rewriting most of it from scratch....twice...which was more work than I had expected.  Things seemed to be going fine in this second version of the pool until those glitches which started 22nd May.  Unfortunately I don't really have the time to go through all of the code in the hope that I can fix the error (and don't want to risk the potential cost of things glitching yet again).  It's sad as I'd hoped to do good with the pool and the "good causes" donations, but I guess I need to be practical too.