There are still websites legit or not that are offering “cloud mining” services. I wouldn't recommend to anyone to get involved with those. There are two types of them – scammers and those which are remotely profitable, but at the end you will be better if you go and buy the Crypto at the exchange instead of buying contract and mining it. The reason for this is because everything is volatile – the price of crypto, the prices of hash rates, the mining difficulty and so on.
Back in the summer of 2017 I bought a new PC and found out that VGA/CPU mining was actually a thing, so I started earning small amounts of XMR of my Ryzen 5 and RX580. Later in the summer I lost my job and had lots of free time so started reading/watching in details for different options to earn crypto and possibly make living out of it. So I got hooked up by this guy on YouTube CryptoNick on services such as Genesis Mining, Hashflare, Bitconnect. Anyway, I started looking to get contracts with Genesis and HF, but at the time Genesis had no power to offer and the only viable option was Hashflare with their 1 year contracts. So I went in and spent like 500$ on little more than 3TH of mining power - this was around November 2017.
And I started earning bitcoin every single day. It was amazing. Soon I started to reinvest my earnings and put even more money into it. It went at some point to earn like 20$ per day in bitcoin for a short period of time. And then Bitcoin started dropping it's price like crazy, and the contracts with Hashflare started to be less and less profitable due to the fixed 37 cents per TH maintenance fee. At the begining the maintenance fee was like 15% of the earnings, but with the BTC price dropping it went up - 30-40-60-80%. At some point in the beginning of the summer of 2018 the maintenance fee went over 100%, basically it means that nobody is getting anything except Hashflare.
Shortly before the maintenance fee to reach 100%, Hashflare directly tried to scam even more uneducated people by reducing the prices for getting hash rate by 80%. What I once paid $140 was now discounted for $25, however it did not matter if you have 1TH or 200TH because of the flat maintenance fee that was simply higher than the amount of BTC that can be mined with this equipment.
Sadly I made just about 20% of the total money I put in HF. Worst part is the way the company handled the customers - we are talking tens if not hundreds of thousands of people losing huge amounts of money. They kept the minimum withdrawal very high for a very long time - 0.05, then they lowered it to 0.01, but locked all withdrawals for months, no matter if you reached the minimum withdrawal limit.
At the end they came up with this KYS verification requirement that took 2-3 months to be completed. I managed to get all the bitcoin that was in my account, but the feeling at the end was very shitty. There is plenty more information about how it happened and other people's stories in Hashflare's Reddit. I would recommend everyone to go and read about it, before thinking to invest any serious money in Cloud Mining.
The fact is I made some money with the cloud mining of Minergate (not available anymore) and got all the bitcoin I invested in it in about 9 months and got some on top of that.
I'm glad I did not put any money in Bitconnect.
As for this moment in time – winter/spring of 2020 I would not recommend getting any kind of Bitcoin mining contracts due to the halving that we will witness in May. Point is, it is very possible that what's not profitable will stop being so after the block reward is cut in half. Other option is many of the current miners to quit and the difficulty to drop by half, but this is far fetched and I do not consider it to be very likely.
