We used this fantastic server restarting plugin in Bukkit called Server Restater
https://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/server-restarter/
It did several things that were very nice…
- You could schedule restarts-
- When the restarts happened it would bring up a scoreboard with the restart time
- It would play sounds alerting afk players that the server was restarting
- it would play more sounds as it counted down.
- You could type a command ingame that would reschedule restarts, or even schedule them temporarily this way we could always give players 5 minutes before the server restarted.