Anyone have a positive dedicated server experience in Mistlands?

I took up valheim again this holiday season to try out mistlands with my friends.

I'm no stranger to linux servers, so I followed this guide to host a valheim server using EC2. Which uses mbround18's docker image to run the server software, I quickly ran into similar issues to the person in this post, with too much backing up and made similar fixes.

At first it was fine with 2-3 people running through meadows chopping trees and boars, but as we start sailing and moving on to swamp biome, even on AWS instances with lots of RAM, CPU cores and Network Bandwidth, when 3 or more people are in the same space, especially on a ship together, the lag becomes unbearable.

During this lag, I'm monitoring CPU and RAM usage, and RAM never goes higher than 3GB on an 8GB machine, and CPU usage remains at a steady 20% with some spikes to around 50-60%. And I have retrospective network bandwidth monitoring, and the bandwidth isn't even close to maxing out (most instances are up to 5Gbps, and we're barely touching 100's of Mbps), I even tried upgrading to 25 Gbps instances again no help.

I like the fact with AWS that you can turn the server on and off and pay for only what you use, but the lag with 3 or more players is so unbareable, I was about to just pay for Apex whether I was going to be using the full month or not, and then I noticed this comment on an entire thread talking about server issues since Mistlands saying that they were having the exact same issues as me on Apex.

So does anyone have any positive experience with hosting 3+ players since Mistlands? If so, what are you using?

(My personal use case is that I have 8-10 friends, who play now and then, most days no one uses the server, then we all start using it on the weekend, and usually have 3-5 players at once).