Yeah, Slackware =]. People tend to laugh when you use it ("LOL WHO USES SLACKWARE!?!??!111") but its packages are hand-picked to be stable and rock solid. On top of this, it's very easy to get a bare-bones install that doesn't enable a bunch of useless shit (and open ports) at startup. Beware, all package management is by hand for the most part and doesn't support dependencies. So if you install a package, you have to know what other packages it depends on. Also, be ready to compile some of your favorite services by hand since a lot of them aren't in the distributed packages (think things like NginX, HAProxy, etc). Things like Apache, MariaDB, Python, Ruby, PHP, are included though.
It's one the oldest linux distros and doesn't really hold your hand that much. You'll be editing a lot of config files by hand. However once you get used to it you'll definitely feel a much stronger connection to your box than with a lot of distros that try to make things easier. /r/slackware is a good resource, there are a good amount of lurkers that jump at any chance to help someone out, and linuxquestions.org is a good forum as well.
EDIT: forgot to mention: don't rule out FreeBSD/OpenBSD as well. They are known to be pretty solid for hosting as well.
Slackware is OK if you want to play around with Linux on a non-public-facing system, but it's bad advice if you want to run a secure public-facing server. It's too difficult to do automatic package updates on Slackware. Since so little software is packaged, you end up having to install most software manually, which means you become responsible for monitoring that software for security advisories and upgrading it in a timely manner when there's an advisory.
Here's my advice for a secure public-facing server: use Debian Stable, set up automatic upgrades every night, install as much as possible from the official Debian repository, and be sure to upgrade to the next Debian release before your current release loses security support. This way, the Debian Security Team is responsible for monitoring security advisories and rebuilding packages instead of you having to do it yourself.
Source: I just finished transitioning to Debian after 10 years of Slackware use, in large part because I found it too difficult to keep my Slackware installations secure.
It's one the oldest linux distros and doesn't really hold your hand that much. You'll be editing a lot of config files by hand. However once you get used to it you'll definitely feel a much stronger connection to your box than with a lot of distros that try to make things easier. /r/slackware is a good resource, there are a good amount of lurkers that jump at any chance to help someone out, and linuxquestions.org is a good forum as well.
EDIT: forgot to mention: don't rule out FreeBSD/OpenBSD as well. They are known to be pretty solid for hosting as well.