I just read this article <http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Optimization/Offloading> on how you can upload your content to external sources to improve speed and save bandwidth. 

Anyway, my site has lots of images, but all of them are either static content or thumbnails that are placed beside each post (less than 30kb each). As I have no traffic as of now I don't really need to do this, but optimizing wouldn't hurt.

Moving my content to another server/hostname is too complicated and not worth it for a small site like mine. Then we have free hosting service like Flickr and Imgur, but I don't think the cons are worth it either. 

**Now I'm left with these options:**
Hotlinking with Dropbox/Google Drive  

CDN (Cloudflare)  

Do nothing (host locally, standard upload through Wordpress)

I don't know what to choose as I don't understand what these services really do, other than it's supposed to be "better" to host externally. I tried reading up but all the jargons were overwhelming. Besides, most sources came from the services themselves.

**TL:DR**

1. Are there really any noticeable difference between uploading my content/theme images the standard way and using services like Flickr, Picasa, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, CDN?   

2. I found out that CDN is a caching service, which means I still have to host it. And now I'm confused. Am I supposed to combine CDN with external hosting, or is it an alternative to it? Meaning I can reach the same benefits as external hosting when I host locally with CDN.

3. There are popular plugins like W3 Total/Super cache. If I use those, can I ignore the options above (cause it sounds like CDN).

I'm sorry for the long post and I'm probably overcomplicating things. It's just that there are so many options, and I can't tell if they are all different methods of achieving the same thing or I'm supposed to use them altogether.