Ok, so after a couple days of reading through all the documents, i followed the setting up a testing server instructions. I forget the exact page I got to it from, but it involved a bunch of clicking. so my biggest problem was that I was trying to login to my local host testing server but use my remote information...somehow it didn't click until an hour ago. But I am successfully on my local testing server and believe I just upload everything to my remote server and things will transfer/work ok? (log-in, registration etc)
I still need to read over the documents for creating order history, store using ecart, downloadable products, integrating usernames with external solutions (helpdesks, live chat, forum), have a dedicated section for a quick user overview (my profile, orders, etc link) and somehow make an order tracking page.