From what I hear it's virtually impossible to mine profitably any more (unless you have access to free electricity).
From what you heard, it is not true and you should not pay close attention to everything you read without you doing some proper research yourself. Sure, if you are in a place where electricity is extremely expensive, it won't pay you cause you will be paying so much for electricity fee, but in a place with a very good electricity rate, you can still make a lot of profit if you have a good setup. S9 and D3 are quite efficient and does not take too much power, so that can make mining profitable for you.
You need to buy an ASICs machine or buy a cloud mining service
Going to the cloud for mining is far worse than mining yourself. I see that as a lazy approach to learning and doing research. If you can do a proper research, and get the right gadget, you can mine and get your ROI pretty fast than when you go the cloud way.