I've been running a Lightning node for 5.5 years now. I did once have to start again from scratch, my old channel.db was corrupted and in the process of debugging the error, I accidentally leaked my seed. But My new node is now almost as old as the old was when it died, and I couldn't imagine functioning without my main node. Every other month, I refill my channels by peering with Loop, then try to spend as much as I can over Lightning (easy here in Vancouver!). I do like the idea that using my own well connected node, I have very low fees for my payments in general, and I can "make some sats back" by selling the resulting inbound. I don't think I could run the node for profit, but it's good to see it routing payments every hour or even more often.