If you do start your own pool, I recommend PPLNS and merged altcoin mining, but no matter what pay out method you choose, please be sure you have a reliable serve with consistent access and stable. Please, Do not rob ever your miners like 50BTC did, I do not like moving pools, I am happy to stay with one group and support it. As long as I can connect, earn and feel cheated!
My actual plan was to create a minimal (0.5%) to 0% PPLNS pool. It would be reliable in the sense that I plan on load balancing a handful of servers from different data centers together in order to provide as much redundancy as possible. As far as "robbing my miners", really not top on my priority list. I'd mostly just be interested in zeroing out the costs of hosting it. Any little bit extra would just be a bonus, really.
My primary concern is to provide an attractive alternative to BTC Guild and GHash.io, especially now that GHash.io is dangerously close to getting to 51% ownership of the network.
Either way, this is all a moot point if I can't get a decent pool server. There are so many to choose from, and it makes finding a better option of the lot difficult to find.
