A working analogy:
A website is personal to you – It’s like a collection of all the contents of your home or small business – your photos, your art, your writing, your files, your structure, and sometimes the installed software that does specific things for you (blogging, etc). You decide what’s on the website for people to see.
A web host is like… the owner of an apartment building. They have lots of sizes of spaces for rent, with various amenities, and with various prices. Like an apartment, each space has a specific number address (It’s a VERY simplified analogy, before y’all nerds start griping). You might need a tiny little closet-sized space for $3 a month, or you might be a medium-sized business, and rent a roomy space with a lot of extra amenities for $300/month. You’ll choose what you need.
The domain name (cleverexample.com) is two things at once.
At the basic level, you rent the sole right to use it, by the year, from the governing bodies of the internet. In that way it’s kind of like the licence plate for your car.
But the real value is to magically allow visitors to arrive at the correct “apartment” in the correct “building” anywhere in the world, when they type your domain name into the browser. Visualize it as a wee sign stuck on a special village signpost, pointing right at your “apartment” website files. There’s also a bit of magic around making your domain name point to your location correctly. (Name servers , DNS settings)
Also EMAIL! A domain name makes it possible for you to have an email address that YOU control, that is personal to you, and that you can keep for as long as you rent the domain name. More on that here….
So to bring it all together, to have a working website, you need your specific domain name (cleverexample.com) that you rent from a registrar so people can find you, a home on the internet that you rent from a web host, and all the files to move into or build inside that home, so people have something more than a blank page to interact with.
A side note: You can move your site. If you decide the web host you’re with isn’t doing it for you, you can pick up your whole website contents, move them into another web host’s apartment building, and then arrange for your domain name to point to the new location. (Although some specialized hosts, like Squarespace and Shopify, trap you by using specialized backend software. A site built in Squarespace will NOT run anywhere else. Boo. Hiss.)