Your feed will validate anywhere using feedburner. There are many options and stats. The site itself is difficult to navigate but worth the time.

Feedburner has the worst UI I have seen since Web 1.0. Indeed, it is a 90's Internet nightmare. It is impossible to navigate even when you know the site. For a new user, it is a labyrinth. I hear the tools for tracking stats are pretty good. But I will never find out. After multiple attempts to track my blog I am giving up and moving on...

Feedburner republishes blog's RSS feed making it more powerful and friendly. The main advantages are as follows:

1. You can find out how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed. It's good to know how many of them there are and how that number has changed over time.
2. Make it easier for your readers to subscribe to your feed.
3. You can set up your account to automatically ping Technorati and others.
4. There are lots of extra features that are easy to select as add-ons to your feed. For example, people who subscribe to my feed see links after every item to email that post to some one, save it in del.icio.us, see how many comments on are on that post and make a comment themselves. You can also display inbound links to that item and lots more.
5. If you change blogs, you can just point your new blog's feed at your account and not keep your subscribers.

After company was acquired by Google, two of their popular PRO services (MyBrand and TotalStats) were made free to everyone

I love Feedburner. If you're a blogger, it's your best friend. They help you track your readers, they help you ping all the big blog search engines when you've made a new post, and they help you add all the cool little Digg and Delicious links at the bottom of each post. I've never had a problem using this service, and as my blogging skills get better, I can always find more sophisticated feed tools to make my blog better. Feedburner seems to stay a step ahead of a blogger's needs.