Using Protractor with PhantomJS

I need to E2E test my AngularJS Application an Protractor seems like the right way to do it. Setup was fairly straightforward and it works like a charm in Chrome. I need however use headless browser and been researching on how to use Protractor with PhantomJS and I found this:

Note: We recommend against using PhantomJS for tests with Protractor. There are many reported issues with PhantomJS crashing and behaving differently from real browsers.

Above is from http://ift.tt/1waoDYR

So my questions are:

1. Is this still the case and Proractor still having issues with PhantomJS?

2. If so how bad is it and is there any better option?

3. How would I do E2E testing when my app is being deployed to server?