I'm using a new virtual server through GoDaddy, and this morning I received a call from the powers that be informing me our website was offline. After confirming this, I requested a power cycle through our GoDaddy control panel, and within a minute or two the server was back online. I made the call, and reported the news that we're back up.

Of course, a couple minutes later we're down again. I tried connecting through PuTTy, and it takes forever to prompt me for a username, and each successive prompt takes a long time to come up. I'm using CentOS. So my questions are:

1. How can I determine the cause?
2. What types of things can I do to prevent this in the future?

One interesting, and perhaps relevant, observation is that yesterday our bandwidth consumption was about 20% greater than our top figures from the past month.