Not too late to change your mind? Red Hat just mailed me: "Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 as of December 31, 2003. Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 9 as of April 30, 2004".
(They want you to migrate to Enterprise Linux).
So I would go with Debian right now. And ditch cPanel unless you're sure you want it. These control panel things can be more hassle than they're worth; webmin is a nice non-intrusive alternative.