hosted machine and load average

[Hetz Ben Hamo]

Hi,

I have my own server which is located in US. It's running CentOS 5.3.

I tried to ssh it today.. no go. I could ping it, but none of the
services were accessible: http, ssh, etc..
I tried to connect using serial. I could see the welcome message, but
I couldn't login (timeout).

The only option left was to ... reboot the server (manually by a technician..)

After rebooting, I don't see anything that might cause the issue.
/var/log/messages doesn't show anything, neither any apache error log.
The only evidence that something seriously happened was in the
sendmail log:

Sep 17 12:57:41 hetz sendmail[2707]: rejecting connections on daemon
MTA: load average: 140
Sep 17 12:57:56 hetz sendmail[2707]: rejecting connections on daemon
MTA: load average: 141
Sep 17 12:58:11 hetz sendmail[2707]: rejecting connections on daemon
MTA: load average: 140

Yikes!

So my question: What do you do in case you have the same scenario?
what steps do you take to prevent things like that from happening?

Thanks,
Hetz
-- 
Skepticism is the lazy person's default position.
my blog (hebrew): http://benhamo.org