Should I have backup mining pools?

Yes, and we recommend it.

Your miner sends its work to a mining pool, which is where your earnings come from. If that pool becomes unreachable, your miner has nowhere to send its work and stops earning until the connection is restored.

Backup pools prevent that. With a secondary pool configured (and an optional third), your miner automatically fails over to the next one the moment its primary drops, so it keeps mining without interruption.

Every miner can run backup pools. Just send the pool details you'd like to use to support@simplemining.io and we'll add them to your miner(s).