You should look around each pool's website more. ecc.cloudminers.net is obviously down or at least no one is using it. They haven't found a block in days even though the norm for them was finding several blocks per day and they are showing no hashrate. If they are showing no hashrate already, why would you trying mining there? You may as well be mining solo, even if they are running OK.

I don't know why you thought there was a problem with ecc.hashfever.com. I've been mining there. Is it possible that if sgminer showed "waiting for work" it may have been waiting for a different pool? At least with cgminer, I can get messages like that for pools that I'm not trying to mine on.

http://ecc.coins4everyone.com/ says that it's in Europe. If you are in Europe too, it might be a good choice. If not, you might find lower stales somewhere else.