What I found pretty great with docker is isolating individual docker systemd instances in rootless linux namespaces (i.e. users). I wrote about this here [1].
This lets you easily create multiple services on one VM that are quite isolated from each other. This system of doing things has worked reliably for me for quite some time, even for the 'bigger' services (gitlab, nextcloud, mailcow-dockerized etc.).
[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2023-12-12_mastodon-docker-rootless...