Alright, thanks. That answered pretty much all of my questions--I was mostly wondering about what went into registering a domain name. That bit about the ICANN was useful, though I must admit, for being such a big power on the internet, they sure have one ugly site.
Anyways, that's good to know about the LAMP stack and all that, and I'll probably be using Fedora as the OS, which should work nicely. I thought about Ubuntu and SuSE, but I don't think they've got what I'm looking for.

I guess all that's left is to choose a site to register my domain name with. I'm looking at that Site5, but I'd like to see some good alternatives before I choose anything. Hopefully Kaniaz, MSG and those folks will show up and shed some light on US domain name services at some point.