Been trying to login to my server for about an hour. ssh is timing out and webmin's not helping either.
I know I've been having some issue with one program that occasionally spikes the load.
Short of telling my hosting service to reboot and being fast on the ssh, is there anything I can do to ensure a login?
Look into Monit: it's an open source watchdog utility that allows you to (amongst other things) stop/start/restart processes based on conditions you specify in the control file. Easy to use, stable and reliable: there's examples in the man pages for dealing with high load processes so you can terminate and alert when your process reaches a threshold you define.