Comment by vladms

You mention the "right distro" but you did not mention what have you tried or with what you had problems with.

From my experience, some examples: for gentoo you are much more than a janitor - you must be everything all the time; for redhat based - you can get a major headache with some version upgrades; for arch (currently using, same install from 7 years) - update monthly and I had very few and minor issues