tjr

Take a look at Pine64 Quartz64 boards as a decent alternative

You’re best off using the PROXY protocol assuming your application(s) support it.

gitlab, several docker containers, kbin, ircds, a bouncer, 3-4 web servers, a couple seperate mysql servers, Handshake DNS hosting and Handshake nodes

Proxmox is all I use for VM hosting, it is well worth it IMO, I colo metal and I host several virtual machines on it, webservers, ircds, kbin, etc. I specifically use Virtual Machines (KVM) however, it does have the ability to do containerization too (LXC).

I use Ubuntu latest LTS for all my servers

same issue here unfortunately, I do wonder if it is cloudflare related

Would need more details such as error logs from the server and what you mean by “proxies”, are you referring to cloudflare’s caching proxy? Also, it is against RFC to CNAME a APEX domain, I am not sure of your exact details but by the way you are explaining things, it seems that you may have done this.