How does buying a domain name work? (website help)

I've never owned a domain name before so I'm kind of clueless on how this all works. I've been told to go to Godaddy.com and just register and purchase a domain name from them.

But I don't understand, how does godaddy then get and own these domain names in the first place anyway? And why do I have to pay to re-register the domain name continuously in the future?

Also I don't have any experience making a website either. I took HTML back 15 years ago in school, but I'm pretty sure a lot has changed since then. I can drag and drop stuff all day long with templates provided that I have them. I've heard of such easy to use templates such as Wix and others.

And how hard would it be to create a site where users can interact with each other live like an online chess site where you can play head to head against others in live matches?

Would I need to hire a webmaster or programmer for this? If anyone has any advice thanks in advance.

Registrars like Gandi and GoDaddy get them from each top-level domain's registry. The .com registry is run by Verisign, and the .org registry is run by Afilias, for example. When a user visits a site in .com, such as nesdev.com, the user's resolver connects to several servers:

User to root name server: "What is the address for forums.nesdev.com?"
Root name server to user: "For names within .com see www.xxx.yyy.zzz for at least the next week"
User to .com name server: "What is the address for forums.nesdev.com?"
.com name server to user: "For names within nesdev.com see aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd for at least the next day"
User to nesdev.com name server: "What is the address for forums.nesdev.com?"
nesdev.com name server: "The address for forums.nesdev.com is 208.71.141.55 for at least the next 6 hours"


It costs money for the registries to run the root name server and .com name server, and most domain registrars also bundle a basic name server for that domain at no extra charge.


There are plenty of tutorials.


A lot of the template-generated stuff is unnecessarily large, which means longer loading times, more CPU RAM use by viewers, and a bigger bandwidth bill for both the server and viewers.


That'd need JavaScript for the client and some programming language for the server.

I'd just say go with Dreamhost because then you don't need to make your home address public information in the Whois database.

If you need free hosting (Domain registration is not free) for static web pages, you can use Github web hosting as long as you properly create the CNAME file.

Isn't there lots of ad-less free hosts nowdays though?

For tutorials I recommend https://www.w3schools.com/ I learned HTML5 and CSS in minutes there, and also some JavaScript.
You use HTML5 for document content, CSS for layout/style (content and style are supposed to be kept separate nowdays) and JavaScript for more advanced content.
There are tons of other tutorials on the site as well, including for server languages but I don't think that is something you learn in minutes.