"Why was this made?
This was just a hobby project to help me get a better understanding of C# and ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework."

This tells me that this project was created just to learn those 3 things, meaning that voat was built without greatly evaluating the best technologies for its use case. therefore I ask you to reevaluate the technologies used.

A few points:

• According to IRC, MSSQL licenses are per CPU (core?)
• MSSQL excludes developers not running windows
• In the future a distributed database might be needed (something like casandra, but thats up to the evaluation)
• Maybe reevaluate the language too. A language that compiles to machinecode is faster, but takes longer to develop usually. those have to be weighted against each other.