I used to visit that blog daily in my early Bitcoin and mining days. It's an amazing and trustworthy source of information as far as I'm concerned. They used to review mining equipment pretty early and they were given the chance to test pretty much all scrypt related hardware that came out in the last two years, sometimes even before it was publicly available. They also tested, reviewed and compiled mining software and they give a pretty good and impartial overview about pretty much all the things they write about.
If you follow the blog there is indeed a history of testing cloud mining services and in every new service they present they warn people to invest cautiously and they show their profits or their losses according to what they're getting and show estimates for ROI. Starting from that a reader can tell if it's worth risking their coins or not (we all know what's the cloud mining industry like...).
If they're paid to speak about these services? I don't know. It might be possible they are. But they're pretty legit with what they write and obviously we can't follow whatever we're told on the internet
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
Another good thing is that they aren't constantly painting the picture in a bright way, just like someone marketing these services would.