Zcash (ZEC) is currently the crypto currency everyone is all about when talking about mining and profitability and it is no wonder that this is actually happening with all the hype and user interest. While Zcash mining is still in its slow mining phase the mining craze is just starting and more people are still joining in. The companies offering cloud mining services were also early to jump on the hype train and start offering hashrate to people before even the mining actually began. While the initial cloud mining offers for Zcash might not have been bad, especially the first days after the mining actually started, now the situation is really not that good with these offers.
Even if you have invested some money in cloud mining hashrate for Zcash already and initially things have not looked bad in terms of the time needed to get a return of your investment, now things actually do not look very bright. Cloud mining companies are still charging too much for too little hashrate that you get back in return, meaning that even ROI is far from possible in the term of the contract, let alone to actually make some money. Of course that goes if you mine and sell, not keep the mined coins (after the slow start is over) and wait for a big spike in price of ZEC in the foreseeable future, though that is also quite risky thing to do. Spending $2699 USD for a 1 year cloud mining contract that will secure you 100 H/s in terms of hashrate is pretty steep at the moment with all of the latest performance optimizations that the latest Zcash mining software offers for both AMD and Nvidia-based video cards.
Currently a single AMD Radeon R9 280X video card that you can pick from eBay used for as low as $100-150 USD is capable of providing you a hashrate of 120-140 H/s, or with other words more than what a $2699 USD 1 year cloud mining contract will. For the price of such mining contract you can actually build a pretty good high-end gaming PC that will be able to provide you with even higher hahsrate, even if you throw in the electricity costs into the price. So investing in a Zcash cloud mining contract with such high prices for such low hashrate at this point is really not worth it, you are pretty sure to lose money than make some. With crypto currency mining you would expect to actually make money and not loose, so you are better off not going for unreasonable cloud mining offers, but to go for mining at home with what you already have available in your computer or even buying new hardware.
We are expecting to see even more optimizations of the mining software available from Claymore for AMD and NiceHash for Nvidia GPUs, so those cloud mining offers will become more and more unreasonable as an investment. In order to make them somewhat interesting for users they need to be reduced a couple of times in terms or price or get the hashrate increased significantly over what is currently being offered. There are a couple of companies competing on this market already offering cloud mining hashrate for Zcash (ZEC), but since they compete with each other for customers and they target users that are less likely to mine themselves at home, they just stick to high prices, so you don't have much of an option...
What I would really recommend is not to go for cloud mining offers for Zcash at the moment, but if you are really interested in trying mining yourself even if you are not experienced in crypto currencies and mining. It is really not that hard to get started as you might think, you can check my post - How to Easily Mine With Your Computer and Get More Steem, A Guide for People Not Into Crypto Currencies. That one may not be the most optimal solution, but is certainly one of the easiest to get started and then you can just continue to build on top of the initial steps and improve your knowledge, experience and profit in mining.
With all of the above said I should probably write a couple more guides to help you move from the initial step already covered in the post for total newbies into crypto mining. The best thing is that no matter what kind of crypto currency you are mining you can still easily get it converted to Steem and grow your Steem Power and in the process also increase the demand for Steem tokens and help the whole Steem economy...
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