I had precisely the same concerns. I first set up a basic webserver on Linode since they had images for Arch. I was skeptical particularly because I've screwed

I had precisely the same concerns. I first set up a basic webserver on Linode since they had images for Arch. I was skeptical particularly because I've screwed stuff up on Arch systems during an "aggressive" update. It's been rock solid and I deal with updates through a basic test methodology. I keep a mirror of the system on a VM and update that first. I am also very conservative about what packages I update. I'm only running nginx and a couple basic services along with Haskell related packages to update my static website, so I can't speak to anything more complex than that, but I've been very happy so far. The big advantage for me is the single mental model between my personal and server systems.