8-14 months between any significant update for the particular FreeBSD you're running is too much. Severe bugs get fixed only in a release, not in your patches.
8-14 months for bugfixes to what exactly? All the serious packages you use in most servers are installed via packages/ports. What's actually in the base system that isn't (a) also in ports or (b) needs upgrades more frequent than to as frequent as Fedora (which is 6 months btw).