AUR is definitely one of the best thing for me, along with the rolling release scheme, the simplicity and the wiki.
But you say you use it on your servers? I'm not sure I would do it because Arch doesn't focus on stablity like Debian does, and sometimes update to core packages can break other packages, so... Not a big deal on your own computer but on a server? I would be happy to know if you have good reasons to use it on server :)
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.
Could you please elaborate on how you created the mirror?
I have almost the same setup (Arch, Linode, nginx) and although my VPS has been rock solid so far, I would like to have something like this for testing purposes.
But you say you use it on your servers? I'm not sure I would do it because Arch doesn't focus on stablity like Debian does, and sometimes update to core packages can break other packages, so... Not a big deal on your own computer but on a server? I would be happy to know if you have good reasons to use it on server :)