Because of the mark that hashocean had left on the bitcoin community, people seems to be reluctant in investing on cloud mining sites. In our perspective, hashocean has always been a ponzi from the start; no one denied that in our community. I am just baffled on how it gained such a huge following.
I am gonna answer you straightforward based on my experience.
1. Yes, but you must differentiate the legitimate fake from the legitimate sites.
How?
Look into their site. Look at their address, company name and their partners and their mining equipment. Mining equipment are the one who mines you your coins. Look into their fees and rewards. They should not be giving too much rewards because they are a business entity not a charity. If they are becoming a charity, get out.
Look into the expiration of their domain. Most High-Yield Investment Programs hiding themselves as cloud mining sites usually just register for a year but not all. HYIPs are the what I call "charity sites" because they pretend give so much to investors and when the time is right, they bail out and get away with the accumulated money.
2. Always know the profitability of whatever you are trying to mine. Look into how you are going to profit from your investment.
The profit depends on the currency of your target, the difficulty for each currency, the electricity or maintenance fees, your hash rate, and maybe the pool fees. Thankfully, you can just search the mining calculator that you want and you can already see the predicted profit in seconds.
I have encountered sites like miningrigrentals and nicehash that offers legitimate cloud mining but in a short amount if time and the profitability is bollocks because they have to pay the people who sells their mining power.
3. The prices go up and down and the difficulty changes every time. There is a reason why you should take that into account.
Sites that offer power with a "fixed" amount of reward like 10kh/s = 0.001 BTC/day profit. Get away from those sites because they are not trusted. We all know that the difficulty changes and it means that the profit declines depending on the change of difficulty so it is not stable. Overtime, the profit declines and you have to increase your power more. This is why we have a mining calculator.
4. Remember that cloud mining is just a substitute for actual mining.
There should be people who manages the mining rigs and you should be certain that they actually exist. An example here is hashnest, they are partnered with bitmain a site that sells mining rigs. We know that they mining centers exist so we are sure that we are buying legitimate power from them.
The only difference is that you pay them for the equipment, electricity cost, and maintenance.