My guess is that that was a phony reason to mask some other one. I run a reddit clone with as much activity as voat gets, and I do it from the smallest server DigitalOcean offers for $5/month. That includes running it, the Postgres server, etc. It has near instant load times.

Either something with their software is really messed up (Lemmy is a great example of a reddit clone that requires an order of magnitude more server power than it should) or there's a more insidious reason and the admin just wants the whole thing to go away without giving a reason that will incite the mob against them. You can see them in there already calling for the doxx of the angel investor who stopped paying.