I would suggest Octopress/Jekyll framework to serve static web pages from a VPS such as DigitalOcean/linode. You may as well use Github Pages to host your web pages if that meets your needs.
This will meet many of your needs listed.
26 karma · joined March 14, 2012
This will meet many of your needs listed.
There are choices - Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSuse etc. and each distribution differs in user interface and the hardware support (graphic cards/wifi/bluetooth etc.). So far, Ubuntu seems to have a slight upper hand on hardware compatibility.