Welcome to the gang Tiffany (thats my sister name by the way).
1) If you speaking of the FCC license search page, a vanity license is abbreviated "VA" and the amateur license if "HA". But if you just choose "amateur" from the drop down menu, you'll get both as vanity is a sub-category of Amateur. You have to have an amateur license before you have a vanity callsign.
The license exam is given by many ham radio clubs. Check with the ham radio club in your town if you have one. Chances are they offer the testing or know a club than does. Some clubs even offer remote testing where you can sit at home and use zoom to take the exam. I'm a VE for my club and we give the exam after each monthly meeting. We tested 4 yesterday and passed 4. You can go to the ARRL webpage here and search for a test session in your area https://www.arrl.org/find-an-amateur-radio-license-exam-session.
2) Yes. In fact, there are many "nets" on HF that you can check in with. I'm a member of several nets. One is the "Treasure Coast Net" where hams along the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Florida check in weekly and exchange news and rag chews. There are some nets for young ladies only. You can find nets by going to https://www.k3clr.com. I will show you all the nets that are curently happening, who is checked into the net, and even who is talking at the time. if you click on the prticular net. There is normally not charge to check into a net or become a member of a net, but some do charge a modest fee if you want a cool membership certificate with your name on it to hang on the wall.
3) I got involved in ham radio when my nut anti-government buddy gave me a Baofeng so we could talk "when the russians nuked us". I wasn't interested in getting nuked, but there's a repeater about 6 miles from my house I could listen to, all the cats on the repeater sounded like cool fellas, and I wanted to talk, which required a license. After that I was hooked and kept on growing and finding more cool things to do with ham radio, such as the ability to use Winlink to send emails with a radio when I don't have Internet. I live in North Carolina (Hurricane alley) and we often lose the grid for sometimes a week or ten days, so ham radio offers a way to communicate when the grid is down and the cell towers over burdened. I like getting SL cards from all over the world. I currently have QSL cards from about 40 states, Europe, and South America.
4) That's like asking how much it costs to get into golf. You can buy a $200 set of clubs or you can buy a $5,000 set of clubs. For me, I started out with the Baofeng UV-5R. They cost about thirty bucks but are really only practical if you have a repeater closeby you can reach. Then I upgraded to a Yaesu mobile that I use for a base station. The mobile radio was about $300, the antenna was about $125, the power supply about $100, the coax cable about $75. Keep in mind that will let you talk local if you have a repeater within, say, 20 miles of you. If you want to talk worldwide, you'll need to invest in an HF radio. I'd say a decent HF radio would run you about $800 for a basic radio with no "fancy" on it, although there are ones that cost $10,000. You tend to get what you pay for, and the more expensive radios usually offer more features. You'll need an HF antenna, and your options there are make you own dipole for about 40 bucks, or buy an HF antenna retail from somewhere like DX Engineering. They cost from $200 to a few thousand retail depending on what you want to do with it and how fancy you want. For what it's work, I built my 40 meter dipole for about $30 and I've talked to hams in Italy, U.S., Canada, Jamaica, Germany, the Virgin Islands, and South America on it. You don't really need any crazy skills to build one, just some novice soldering skills, a tape measure, and some wire snips, screwdriver, and wrench. but you will need an antenna analyzer to tune it. That's where joining a local club will come in helpful. Someone in the club will have an analyzer they might loan you if you don't feel the need to put out $400 - $700 for one, and they'll be able to help you assemble your dipole.
You'll find out, if you haven't already, that there is a lot of different facets of ham radio, it isn't just talking to other people. Some people enjoy collecting QSL cards, some people like to learn and communicate by CW (Morse code), some people like getting onvolved in emergency communications organizations like ARES, AUXcom, RACES, etc, some people like the tech side of it and like to build their own antennas and radios, some people just like the comaraderie of rag chewing and their local clubs social functions, some people just want to have a back up way to communicate with family and friends or receive news outside the new media channels "if we get nuked".
AND don't forget, once you get your technicians ticket, you can create an account at EchoLink, download the software, and use your PC or iPadto talk to other EchoLink hams all aound the world and you don't even need a radio. https://echolink.org
Maybe others will chime in and might be able to offer an alternate view, but that's about what I have to offer.
73 de Anthony, KD3Y
Amateur Extra, VE examiner, and VP of Carteret County Amateur Radio Society
www.w4ymi.org