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).