Like a lot of people here I am still new to the scene, I would like to know whats the most preferred site to take out cloud mining contracts on?
If you want to have the same number of coins as you started with or more, none of them.
From what i can see the ROI seems to be around 6-8 months and then you start making profit.
There is a daily equipment maintenance fee on most of them, does that scale up ? Would that eventually become more than what I earn ?
Yes. In the case of Genesis Mining, you make revenue for the first few months or so and then the difficulty starts to catch up with the price and your revenues decrease until the maintenance fee takes over. Usually that's when you've made around half of your money back and lost the rest, but they typically pretend that you're in profit by showing you the money in fiat terms rather than in the BTC that you actually invested.
Also how do payouts work on most of them? I have been looking at minergate, would it payout what i mined on a daily basis or does it need to reach a certain value like 0.001 BTC or something ?
Yes, usually on a regular basis, sometimes daily. But I don't know about the site you're talking about, so you'll have to check yourself.