Search Query Not Handling Large Number of Users

We have an asp.net-core website which handles users search as follows:

public async Task<ICollection<UserSearchResult>> SearchForUser(string name, int page)
{
return await db.ApplicationUsers.Where(u => u.Name.Contains(name) && !u.Deleted && u.AppearInSearch)
.OrderByDescending(u => u.Verified)
.Skip(page * recordsInPage)
.Take(recordsInPage)
.Select(u => new UserSearchResult()
{
Name = u.Name,
Verified = u.Verified,
PhotoURL = u.PhotoURL,
UserID = u.Id,
Subdomain = u.Subdomain
}).ToListAsync();
}

The query translates to something similar to the following:

SELECT [t].[Name], [t].[Verified], [t].[PhotoURL], [t].[Id], [t].[Subdomain] FROM (SELECT [u0].* FROM [AspNetUsers] AS [u0] WHERE (((CHARINDEX('khaled', [u0].[Name]) > 0) OR ('khaled' = N'')) AND ([u0].[Deleted] = 0)) AND ([u0].[AppearInSearch] = 1) ORDER BY [u0].[Verified] DESC OFFSET 10 ROWS FETCH NEXT 10 ROWS ONLY ) AS [t]

In Client-Side we use typeahead and bloodhound as follows:

engine = new Bloodhound({
identify: function (user) {
return user.UserID;
},
queryTokenizer: Bloodhound.tokenizers.whitespace,
datumTokenizer: Bloodhound.tokenizers.obj.whitespace('name'),
dupDetector: function (a, b) { return a.UserID === b.UserID; },
remote: {
cache: false,
url: '/account/Search?name=%QUERY&page=0',
wildcard: '%QUERY'
}
});

and we configure typeahead as follows:

$('#demo-input').typeahead(
{
hint: $('.Typeahead-hint'),
menu: $('.Typeahead-menu'),
minLength: 3,
classNames:
{
open: 'is-open',
empty: 'is-empty',
cursor: 'is-active',
suggestion: 'Typeahead-suggestion',
selectable: 'Typeahead-selectable'
}
},
{
source: engineWithDefaults,
displayKey: 'name',
templates:
{
suggestion: template,
empty: empty,
footer: all
},
limit: 5
})

The search works just find on localhost and the query runs great as a sql query.
I have also created an index on Verified and cut the speed to 1 second or less.

Our website has millions of registered users and the problem is that as soon as we make search available for all users the DTU percentage on Azure goes to 100% and the queries timeout.
We also have a redis cache to speed-up similar queries but this didn't help us with this issue.

Your support is appreciated :)