Don't forget if your main pool is down at any particular time, you can always be running 2 pools (one as a backup) by using:
  ./cgminer -c pool1.cfg -c pool2.cfg

Where pool1.cfg contains your default pool to use and pool2.cfg contains what to use when pool1 is down

You can run it in this mode all the time and it will stay on pool1 until an outage occurs