Yeah, I won't ever, ever, run production servers on ArchLinux. (Even though I still use arch for my own machine). Doing that is asking for unnecessary pain.
I was used with slackware, gentoo, debian and ubuntu to make frequent update to make sure I had the latest security fixes. On archlinux, it's a different story. "Updating" means "Take a gamble to update the system hoping important packages haven't been changed, renamed or deleted.". Ok, it's not really a gamble because you're supposed to read the archlinux news to know if your next update will fuck up everything.
I learned it the hard way... Once, I had to update a server to get a more recent version of a package.. which ended up deleting all rc.d in favor of using systemd. No warning, no nothing. The only answer I could get is "Why are you updating without reading the archlinux news". Fun couple all nighters time.
All problems (or almost all of them) can be caught by using better testing.. That doesn't mean that some tools aren't better than others.
On my production servers, I don't care about not being on the very edge of all technology. I'd prefer something highly secure and stable where all the code can run safely. I also want a very strong community with outstanding documentation. So, all in all, for my use cases, I think going with Ubuntu is a smarter choice. It doesn't mean that I don't use archlinux every day on my own machines where I can have fun screwing it up and hacking it back.
And, just for the notice, that were only small examples, but I'm talking more generally about backward compatibility and expected behavior. A very good example is jquery.. I'm not worried about getting the last update. It's not like ".click" would stop working. Contrast that to others less mature technology (such as express for node.js) where it can be pretty scary to update packages. You better have a gigantic test suites to upgrade without fear of breaking something.
Sounds like you were asking for it.