I am Using Ubuntu Server and would like to know if it's possible to automatically restart services that go unresponsive. I am operating a standard LAMP stack and occasionally vital services need to be restarted but I want to do it in a programmatic way.
To handle services that go into a crashed state, look at Munin and/or the Linux watchdog daemon.
Supervisord and along the same lines Mozilla Circus are also interesting plays.
You can try to use monit to do this.