Apache server keeps crashing, "caught SIGTERM, shutting down"

I had mysterious SIGTERM shutdowns in our L.A.M.P. server, and it turned out to be an error in a custom PHP module, which was caused by mismatched versions. It was found by looking in the apache access/error logs at the time of malfunction. Don't forget to turn error logging on.

SIGTERM is used to restart Apache (provided that it's setup in init to auto-restart): http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/stopping.html

The entries you see in the logs are almost certainly there because your provider used SIGTERM for that purpose. If it's truly crashing, not even serving static content, then that sounds like some sort of a thread/connection exhaustion issue. Perhaps a DoS that holds connections open?

Should definitely be something for your provider to investigate.