In general, there are two ways to acquire bitcoins: buying them with real money or "mining" them.
There are other ways too. Main way to acquire bitcoin is the same way as you acquire any other currency by working for it and getting paid in bitcoin! For example if you own a shop you can sell your goods/services for bitcoin.
As long as your machine is up and running, it generates a certain amount of bitcoins every day, and the benefits are endless. Acquiring bitcoins this way does not require you to watch the price every day, wait for the price to rise later, and directly trade in cash.
Mining has costs, you need to pay for the electricity and keep an eye on cooling the equipment. So you do need to worry about the price. It also means it heavily depends on the electricity price you are paying, if it is low then you can compete otherwise if your electricity costs a lot (like these days in EU) it is not possible to make a profit by mining and you're better off buying bitcoin.
Relatively speaking, cloud mining is the lowest cost.
Actually the cost of cloud mining is extremely high since the majority of them are scams or Ponzi schemes and will take your money and run.