I love all things free and I love all things fast. How often do those things cross paths? Rarely. I have recently stumbled across CoralCDN, a free, P2P Content Delivery Network. For the most part, it’s super fast, and it’s always free.

Configuration is probably the simplest thing I’ve ever seen. Simply append “.nyud.net” to the end of your URL, and voi la! Coral’s servers download whatever it is you linked to, cache it, and then can serve it up later much faster than your server probably can. Let’s face it. Most of us only have 1 server, and it’s usually shared. Speed isn’t always guaranteed. With Coral, the load speed is fast and the bandwidth load is pulled off of your server. Cool? Cool.

For WordPress users, there are several plugins that you can use. The first, is recommended by CoralCDN and works fairly well. It can be seen here. The second can be seen here and works just as well if not a little better (I’m using the Coral recommended here and the other on my other blog)

Since I don’t really want to afford paying for Amazon’s AWS, this isn’t a bad temporary solution.

Have you ever used Coral? What are your thoughts?