The continued rise in mining difficulty makes solo mining unprofitable leaving cloud mining as the best avenue for those who take maximising their investments seriously.

Cloud mining opens up the world of cryptocurrency mining to people who may be in remote locations and might have little or no technical knowledge and/or the hardware infrastructure. The process of cloud mining is very simple and only requires a person to open an account with a cloud mining company via its website and select certain things like the contract period and hashing power.

I have written a review of cloud mining using the Hashmart service as an example here https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/could-cloud-mining-services-such-as-hashmart-be-the-gateway-to-taking-bitcoin-mining-mainstream-3fa630829