If you acquire hosting, you rent space for your website, plus extras.When renting space for your real-life business or your home apartment, you might be paying for square feet of space, plus heat, electricity, water, perhaps landscaping and even security services.

Online, it’s kinda the same.
Your hosting fee gets you space on the server, plus connection to the internet. It may also get you script-running capabilities, maybe shopping cart software, mailing list software, and other extras.

As with real-life renting, what you get depends on what you pay, and also what deals you can sniff out.

There’s a few different things to consider about having your very own website under your very own domain name. You can get your geek to do all this for you, but it’s still probably better for you to have an understanding of what’s involved.

(1) Get a domain Name
You gotta have or get a domain name, like joansmith.com, mynonprofit.org, ilovecats.net.
A domain name is rented yearly from a domain registrar.
(A domain name ain’t the same as a website. You can own a domain name, and not have it hosted anywhere, or have it set up with a host just for email, or any number of things.)

(2) Get a host
You have to have a host, who owns or rents the server / computer upon which you keep the files that comprise your website. (Like a landlord who owns the building out of which you run your small business).
You and your host-landlord make agreements about rent, space, what you can or can’t keep in your space, and how much bandwidth (visitor traffic) you’re allowed.

(3) Move Your Content In
Once you’ve made arrangements to move in, and told your registrar about your new name server, you need to move in your files. (Like moving your furniture and belongings to your new apartment). It’s called uploading the files to the server, and you mostly do that with an FTP (file transfer protocol) program.
If it’s a brand new site, your new website may consist of one page that says “Coming next week”, kinda like when you first move out as a teenager, and have only a futon, a fork, and toothbrush.
If you already have a site with content and design and such, you can just move it all in to your new digs, and once the domain name servers propagate your new address, people can find you and drop in (surf, browse) to view your site.

and possibly…

(4) Construct, Build, and design

If you don’t have a website (a grouping of pages, images and scripts) already, you’ll need to build your own or get someone to do it for you.