At least with physical miners, it's possible to make a profit. People have made profits when they did their own research and the company delivered the hardware on time. It's rare but it happens. Trading aside, literally nobody has made a profit with CEX.IO in BTC terms. Their contracts have been unprofitable from the very beginning. And the only cloud mining sites that were profitable so far eventually turned out to be ponzis.
If you can get legitimate cloud mining contracts for cheaper than the cost of a physical miner, then you'd also make a profit from cloud mining too.
You could currently buy 1700 Gh/s of AMHash off Havelock for less than 0.00097499 BTC/Gh, so less than 1.657483 BTC for 1700 Gh.
AMHash charges 0.001551 USD/Gh/day for maintenance. For 1700 Gh, that's 2.6367 USD.
An SP20 is currently selling for 479 USD. At 235 USD/BTC, that's 2.03829787 BTC. You also need to pay for shipping and a PSU.
The SP20 does 1700 Gh/s (customers say about 1500-1600) and consumes 1200 W.
That gives 0.00119900 BTC/Gh and 28.8 kWh used daily.
With an electricity cost of 0.1 USD/kWh, that gives a daily running cost of 2.88 USD.
The SP20 can also be underclocked to 1176 Gh/s using 639W.
That gives 0.00173325 BTC/Gh and 1.54 USD daily running cost or 0.001310 USD/Gh/day.
You are more likely to profit from legitimate cloud mining than you are from mining bitcoins at home or even if you get you miner hosted.