* In linux-land, there's an OOM killer (http://linux-mm.org/OOM_Killer) that would have started taking processes out. You have to exhaust swap for it to really take effect, and once you hit swap, your entire machine suddenly becomes hugely IO bound - in shared or virtual hosting environments, this usually makes the machine totally unresponsive.

* I've never seen any sort of virtual hosting service without either a remote console or a remote reboot. Usually both.