You can absolutely make money mining alt coins. Instead of throwing lots of money at cloud mining, your best bet is to build a GPU miner for $1000-$2000 (or less). You can mine alt coins and then trade them up for BTC or fiat...or just sit on them and wait for them to increase in price. You can even sell off your hardware down the line and recoup some money. Something you also cant do with cloud mining.
This is precisely how I see it.
Choose ATI 7950 videocards if you still find them for decent price; reference, Sapphire or MSI Twin Frozr if you can (for the price, hash rate, modable, low power). 7970s or 280x are a bit better but more expensive. 7870s, 270x or 6950 if you can get them for 100 or less.
I have now an additional Asrock 970 Extreme4 motherboard, a 6-core AMD FX 6100 CPU, a XFX Core 850W PSU and some cards. I can say they work.