after upgrading to  cgminer 2.10.1 I have had no problems

Do you attribute the significant decrease in mining power to be a result of the issues?

Marry Christmas Doc! Let the scala be with you
I wish to everybody lots health, luck and let the "luck" be with us 

Currently under ddos attack. That's why everything is down right now.

No, I haven't received anything.

Last time there was an extortion email sent through the contact form on the website just before the attack started. Nothing this time.

Don't worry, we are still with you They will finally stop DDoS and we will back to mining.

Who is using the bitminter client has no backup pool though (it would be nice to have it). I found that it was down after a while when I perceived a lower temp in my room.

The most likeley attacker is another pool op, my backup is p2pool, so no gain from me, is yours ?

You can also add more Pools to your cgminer like I do.
In cgminer use [P]ool and then [A]dd the "back up" pool.
Use failover in the Pools mining strategy to mine at the backup pool when the main pool is down.


Greetz

Suppose you wanted to set BitMinter as your primary pool and BTC Guild as your secondary.  If you were mining with 4 BFL Singles on COM3, COM4, COM5, and COM6, you could run a command like the following to accomplish your goal using CGMiner.

cgminer-fpgaonly.exe -o http://mint.bitminter.com:8332 -u YourUsername_WorkerName -p WorkerPassword -o mergedmining.btcguild.com:8332 -u YourUsername_WorkerName -p -1 -S \\.\COM3 -S \\.\COM4 -S \\.\COM5 -S \\.\COM6

The "-p -1" where the worker password is supposed to be on the secondary pool is to denote a null password, as I couldn't find any way to create worker passwords on BTC Guild.  If you need help using video cards, I'm sure there are others on the forum who can assist, but I've never use CGMiner with anything BFL products.

Good luck!
WP