Estimating CitC costs

[jair101]

Currently I am on self-hosted with roughly 160-180 people online during the day. Call me paranoid, but I see the death of the self-hosted license in the foreseeable future and I want to plan ahead what my eventual costs on running Community in the Cloud will be. It would be very easy to say with 180 people online you need the 200 user plan and thats it, but its not that simple. 

IPS calculates the average users on 24h period, so while I have 180 during the day, I have like 40-50 during the night, which will probably let me use the 100 users plan...probably, there is no way for me to verify this. I asked in one topic, I will ask here again, but is it possible for IPS to release a tool where self-hosted guys can estimate their correct Community in the Cloud plan based on their current self-hosted load? 

Another issue are the aggressive bots. You can try to limit them as much as possible, there will always be a new one to break the barriers. Even though I have 160-180 people online the stats show most online is 4200. I assure you, this is not from a sudden peak in interest to the excellent discussions in my community, but most likely an aggressive chinese bot. IPS advertises a "feature", which automatically bumps you to the next plan when this happens, so your community stays online. However, I would much rather have my community offline for a while during the attack then entertaining chinese bots with unplanned cost of $200 and possibly even to $400 if the bots are persistent for a day. How this issue is handled with the Cloud communities?

I am not totally opposed to the idea of switching to the cloud, but the above two issues are important - right now I can only have a very rough ballpark figure for cost estimation and it looks like I am at a risk of paying hundreds of dollars in addition, so that various bots can have the luxury of scraping my content. In short, try to sell me CitC, because I am also getting annoyed with all the nginx, php, etc material I have to read and research so that my community runs smoothly on a VPS.