I mean no offense to the author of this, but isn't this type of thing one of the easiest to scale? There's quotes (easy to cache), voting (also very easy to cache), what else? I didn't see the original, so wondering what was there now that made it difficult to scale.
sorry about that! was not expecting the server to blow up when we went to bed and it was running off a very small instance since it was a fun little project. no excuses though! we fixed it and it's running now :)