Its perfect for a small VPS. Been using it for years.
I do occasionally get places where my email simply will not send to them, even though it follows every email standard properly and isnt blacklisted. For those rare occasions, ill use a third party email address to send, which then forwards everything to my main email.
The AUR is unsupported, so any packages you install are your responsibility to update, not pacman's. If packages in the official repositories are updated, you will need to rebuild any AUR packages that depend on those libraries.
To update the package, you use git to pull the latest branch code and repeat the process. You should double check if there are dependency changes though.
Like I said, its easier with a pacman wrapper, but not necessary.
I just personally saved 44 billion dollars by not buying twitter!