Depends what you mean by cloaking your link, but I reckon http://bit.ly should do the trick, you also get stats for your clicks by going to http://bit.ly/shortenedlinks+ which is great for ensuring tracking of your hop link.
If you have only one or two sites bit.ly may be OK - but like all these services, you will soon have to start paying to get tracking. So it maybe better to just use your own site and create a php file with a meaningful name - like mysite.com/gohere.php Then create the gohere.php file that redirects to wherever you want to go: <?php header( 'Location: http://mysite.com/gohere.ph' ) ;?>
If you read the definition of wikipedia, cloaking is a black hat seo technique. A per my opinion, i suggest you create a blog and have your anchor text direct to your link.
I agree. Self hosting the redirect rather than using a service like Bit.ly will give you much better data on your visitors as well
Yes but you can have your very own url shortening script which is available free on the internet. Install one of those script on your server and start using them.
Better download a link tracking script and install it on your server. Use it to shorten long affiliate links and track each one of them.