Hi Africa,
Welcome to the Protoshare mining world.
There are some comparisons here on how various CPU models perform:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=564.0The user above is right - you will need to mine at a pool for some considerable time (personally I give pools 48hrs to prove their worth) and decide then if the speed is right for you. Some pools are faster than others, some payout differently etc etc. If you are going at <100c/min then I'd really recommend getting stuck into a pool as mining solo is going to be a very,
very long process for you otherwise.
In my opinion, cloud mining is very hit and miss and you shouldn't pay for it at all if you can't get a trial on the hardware beforehand. That is, if you can't get a free 24hr trial period or use an account on the hardware before handing your money, then you aren't going to know if the hardware performs or not. I've spent $20 on a months subscription to a 4-core machine only to find it performs worse than my 2-core Pentium processor in my desktop.. Naturally that isn't profitable in the least and if you can't make back what you are spending on the VPS, then it's really a very silly idea.. I can personally recommend Windows Azure for it's cloud mining capability - I've had great results from their $200 free no-risk trial (
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/) and you can quite comfortably make a few PTS with it without paying a single penny. Again, I've had mixed results with other VPS providers -
avoid Cloud at Cost - DigitalOcean are quite good but again, it depends on the node you land on and the other users on that node. The 'hardware' you are using is visualized so you are always going to see performance decreases when compared to their baremetal counterparts. Cloud mining is difficult to make profitable in almost every cryptocurrency out there - Protoshares are no different - and sadly there is no defacto, 'go-to' VPS provider which will guarantee a profit. I'm not saying it's impossible but it is difficult.
As far as how much PTS you will get per month and any calculators out there, I think I've already explained that it's hard to predict short of taking the plunge at doing it. I think you'll net around 1PTS every 12-14 days going at 50-60c/min judging by my own experiences but that isn't taking into account other factors like rejected shares, stale blocks etc etc etc.
Good luck, have fun.
