Dead coins are the best to mine solo

Have you looked into mining other scrypt based coins rather than just plain LTC?
Check http://poolpicker.eu/graph?algo=scrypt and you may see that mining on a scrypt multipool will probably be more profitable than just mining LTC directly.

I have been using hash-to-coins.com for about 30 days and here's why I like them:

1.  The interface is easy to use.  You just click which coins you want to mine for each individual worker (on one screen).  Or you can choose the auto-switch and let the math do the work.  I typically put it in auto-pilot at night and pick my own coins during the day.

2.  Your mined coins are not converted into LTC or BTC.  They stay in their native coin.  I like this because I enjoy trading them on Cryptsy, etc. in hopes of a higher return.  I've found to get a much better return (with a little work or fun) than just using a typical multi pool that automatically trades them for you -- many times at not the best price.

3.  There are no fees -- although I'm donating 2% right now.  I mean that is the least one could do to help pay for the pool operator's expenses?

4.  There are a wide variety of coins (with various difficulties) that are solid -- not rare obscure coins.  So it works well for those who have 90 mh/s miners and those that might be mining with just 1 mh/s.  I have several machines in all ranges - so I mine the hard coins with the A2's (90 mh/s) and the easier coins with my Zeusminers (10, 20, 40 mh/s).

5.  Payouts are pretty much automatic (if you want them to be).  You can manually withdrawal or set to pay to your wallet once you hit a certain threshold (on a coin by coin basis).

6.  The Pool operator is responsive.  I was having a problem with Lotto coin paying to Cryptsy and he provided a whole spreadsheet of every single withdrawal.  That was really nice.

7.  No down-time.  At least I have not experienced any myself.

8.  Good simple stats.  It will list all of the coins -- their difficulties, trading value from multiple exchanges, net hash, pool hash and their profit based on LTC.  This makes it easy to choose coins to mine at the right time.

I've tried a bunch of different pools for bitcoin mining and altcoin mining and I'm impressed with hash-to-coins.  There's nothing else like it. 

At this point, I feel that if you are going to make any money - you need to mine something else besides LTC or BTC.  Their are so many other coins that trade at better prices for the same amount of hashing (if you are willing to trade them yourself).

Finally - this pool makes mining fun again.  I guess some people just want to run their machines and forget about them.  For me - I want to have some involvement and have some fun.

I'm not trying to be an affiliate and don't know the pool operator personally.  I have no real stake in this pool -- just wanted to provide an unbiased review of the pool and help the operator in some way (as I want it to be around for a while)!

I hope you have as much success with hash-to-coins.com and fun as I currently do.   

Well done.
Interesting piece he wrote.