I've had good luck between drives with all but the cheapest and nastiest media burned fast on lousy hardware, so you are likely to be ok in that regard. As for durability, though, I don't think things are substantially better with DVDs than with CDs. There are a few higher end brands marketed as being archival, which will probably last alright if you treat them right; but bit rot is going to happen.
You pretty much have two options: Give up on DVD entirely and use a more expensive but more stable backup method(this usually means USB HDD, two if you are really worried, or tape) or use DVDs and be sure to duplicate your backups every so often. Assuming you aren't buying eXtr3m3Spec1l GoldenFlower+ Econ0disk Supreme brand media(over 75% likely to be circular!) from Honest Yuri's ebay store your burned disks will likely last at least 6 months assuming good storage conditions. As long as you don't have too many backup disks, it won't break the bank or take forever to copy your backups twice a year, and this should cut down on the likelyhood of bitrot getting anything. Checksumming the contents would probably be a good idea though, to make sure that you aren't propagating errors when you copy the disks.