As always, it depends a lot on your objectives / criteria, beyond the one's you have stated (stable, secure, easily maintainable). Those basic 3 have several good answers.
I have recently gone through the process myself, so the questions, which were important to me included (your criteria may differ):
Is it important to you, that one day you may easily migrate to a shared or managed or root-server hosting services provider? Or is it important to you, that any learning you do, is easily applicable to running a hosting service provider based setup? -- This was important for me, and tilted my thinking toward Red Hat or Fedora Core.
How much hardware fault tolerance do you want to design into your server? And what kind? For example, hardware based RAID implies, you will need drivers, which may imply, that drivers for certain hardware are only available for certain distributions, or are they only pre-compiled/packaged for certain distros? If you need hardware drivers, it maybe the single most important factor for your distro. -- In my case I wanted a specific hardware SATA RAID setup, so it forced me to SuSE or RedHat.for the hardware I had. In retrospective, I just might use a software based RAID setup the next time, just to allow me more flexibility in choosing my distro.
What is your level of security consciousness / paranoia? Will you be comfortable to have compilers on your server, or will you just stick with binaries? -- I wanted to avoid compilers, so it shortened my list to the major binary packaged distros, rather than something like Gentoo.
Will you be the only maintainer of the server, or will it be others (or maybe others in the future?) Interesting question, to really flesh out the right answer: If you get hit by a bus, will the need/desire for the server go away? -- In my case, the server will probably go away, if a bus hits me, but if it was important, it would lead to Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, or one of the other highly mainstream distros. For me, it would likely eliminate Gentoo and quite possibly the BSD's.
How much of a "hacker" (in the good way) are you? Do you enjoy compiling your own system components, or do you rather stay with packages? Do you want to have a rather quick start to a complete system, or "roll your own"? -- Again, this will lead to considering only the large, highly pre-fab distros or it leaves the door wide open to other nifty distros (Gentoo et al.). In my case, I wanted to avoid having to compile my own stuff.
For my server setup, I have landed on RedHat or Fedora Core. Fedora is preferable, if hardware RAID drivers wouldn't have forced me to Red Hat 9 on one of my machines.
The ongoing security updates I do through "yum". It is a great tool to keep one's system very easily updated.
To get a good impression of the details, of how I set up my RedHat9 / Fedora servers, have a peek at this document (same document available in 3 formats):
HTML: http://voho.com/vcms/en/BuildServerDetails.html or PDF: http://voho.com/vcms/en/BuildServerDetails.pdf or OpenOffice: http://voho.com/vcms/en/BuildServerDetails.sxw
The document contains another few things I added to the basic distro (like Webmin for remote web based administration of my server).
Good luck in your project!
...Niels
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