Forum

Coming from Win10 I asked 1 year ago Hugo for advice on which distro to start with. He rightly recommended Ubuntu which is a good distro for beginners with many help forums. However I was a bit disappointed by
- their late release process: most software versions including Hiawatha are about 1 year old in the repository, it is not complicated to install deb packages but it can create dependency issues and requires some maintenance.
- bloated is maybe a bit strong but ubuntu is an accumulation of layers changing from one version to another in a way which is not always logic to me. A solution found in a forum for 16.10 may fail or even break things in 17.04.
Eventually after testing a dozen of other distros I found Manjaro, very reliable, helpful community Forum, always up to date. And if you need some special software, you can choose them directly from the Arch repositories. Linux Arch help is impressive.
Manjaro is based on Arch Linux and is currently the #3 disto in distrowatch after Mint and Debian and before Ubuntu.
It eventually took me only about 2 hours to migrate one of my Hiawatha webserver from Win to Linux including the LetsEncrypt certification. It is now up and running.

All that to say that Arch Linux + Hiawatha is the solution of choice and my recommendation for a simple setup, a reliable and secure webserver.

Ubuntu relies mostly on Debian for its packages. And getting new software into the Debian repository is simply impossible, unless you know someone on the inside. Several people from the Arch Linux community have been enthusiastic about Hiawatha, which helped to get Hiawatha packaged.