Any substantial group/idea/person has to have a website these days to prove their legitimacy even in the cyberspace.

Now where does that start? With signing up for a easy to recognize name that is associated with the entity at a Domain Registrar - one who makes sure that you own that name and no one else can get that name, like GoDaddy, 1and1, Network Solutions etc. And you pay for their services-anywhere from $10 to $100+ a year. (Prepare to shell out in the thousands if you want a name real bad, that is already taken). At this point, you only have the name to your credit, with a generic message showing at most but no where close to what you want it to actually be like, when you visit the site via a web browser.

The next step is to get some space on a machine connected to the internet-always, so that John in Bangkok or Joe in Paris can see your website anytime of the day. Called Web Hosting, there are so many choices again here - shared, dedicated, colocation - including the big names like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure etc.

For a simple website, I suggest something like HostGator (best of the lot if you ask me), BlueHost, 1and1, Namecheap and such, where you can get both the above mentioned services in 1 spot with an easy-to-use Control Panel to manage everything.

By the way, for the geek in you,

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whois example.com

shows the information you used to sign up with the Domain Registrar and

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nslookup example.com 
dig example.com
ping example.com

show which IP address(machine) the domain is being served from.

Oh and the next time, I can point anyone, who still ponders why pay twice and are they over-charging etc, straight here..hehe