If you buy a domain name, such as yahoo.com, you purchase this through a domain name registrar. If that's all you did, you would still have nothing. You need a place to put your website, and that is called a web hosting company.

So to have a website requires two things: a domain name from a registrar, and a hosting account to place your HTML files. Typically, a domain name runs about $10 a year, and low cost hosting account costs around $5 to $10 a month.

Once you have both, you would then login to your domain name registrar, usually through the website where you bought it and using a username and password you set up when you purchased it, and point the DNS (domain name server) addresses to your web hosting company. This generally involves typing two URL addresses in, such as nameserver1.myhostingcompany.com.

After you do that, you would then login to your hosting company and upload your HTML website, which you can create on your local computer using an HTML editor. At this point you would then have a working website.

Most hosting companies make this easy by including the domain name with the hosting purchase, so the entire above process is invisible to you.

To recap:

• - Purchase web hosting (approx $10 a month)
  
• - Purchase a domain name (approx $10 a year)
• - Point domain name toward web hosting account
• - Upload website to hosting account