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.

Unless you are committed to it, it isn't worth it, I personally run my own but I have ran it for awhile and my IP seems to have good reputation but it is fairly difficult to get delivery to all major providers on a lot of IP addresses.

You're probably better off using email hosting unless you are committed to deal with the headache.

This is completely standard for residential ISPs at least in the US. Your options are to either host this elsewhere or use a smarthost (somewhat of a proxy) for outbound mail.

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).

Tree Style Tabs is also pretty awesome, didn't see it in the list but idk what I would do without it so I figured that I would comment it

yeah, I've been getting hammered in my transport queue from this. I guess if this is intentional it is worth just defederating to avoid spamming the queue and logs.

We have our instance running on a colo server. I am likely going to rebuild ansible to use a custom pict-rs docker container which offloads images to object storage so I don't need to store media locally on said server.

I use Ubuntu latest LTS for all my servers

I will update this thread if/when I find out more information regarding this.

I've never used CF for object storage, I personally use Backblaze B2, it's pricing is extremely fair. If anyone needs object storage, it is something to consider, I am not sure how it compares to cloudflare though. There unfortunately isn't much documentation on config vars for object storage on lemmy/pict-rs I am still looking into this.

Probably not a bad idea to enable S3 support

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.