Even more reliable solution would be to use a monitoring tool like [Monit][1] or [god][2] that automatically detects that a process is dead and restarts it whether it happened during reboot or not.

You might think that's an overkill but actually the configuration of Monit is a simple as

 check process foo with pidfile /var/run/foo.pid
 start program "foo_start"
 stop program "foo_stop"
 if 5 restarts within 5 cycles then timeout

Of course the assumption is that the administrator is willing to install the monitoring tool for you so it could be a chicken and egg problem :)

 [1]: http://mmonit.com/monit/
 [2]: http://god.rubyforge.org/