Second this, been mining ETC on nanopool since the addition. Been stable so far with low to 0% rejection.

Not to discourage, but you're too late to the party!

First of all, as previous posts, given that you've mastered all the fundamentals, mining bitcoin:

1. Would require heavy sum of capital (ie: hardware, electricity costs, etc)
2. You won't be able to compete with players who are in the game for the past ~6 years, let alone calculating your ROI (return of investments).
3. With the mining difficulties going up, you're better off mining some other altcoins (ie: ETH, ETC or any other coins that you see potential in!).

As for cloud mining, I would suggest that you stay away from it. Take that money and invest somewhere else (ie: BTC or mining hardware) or even yourself! 

Still, if you're really keen, do some research on altcoins mining (all information are available here!), a decent GPU will get you started!

As a closing tip:
Instead of mining BTC, mine potential profitable altcoins and convert them to BTC!