MacOS – problem accessing localhost on Mac OS X Mavericks…it was working fine until I rebooted today

I am perplexed about the problem I am having and would really appreciate help resolving it.

I have an iMac running Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9.2

I have set up my apache to serve documents from the server root /Volume/sites/

I am using Dynamic Virtual hosts, so just by adding a directory with the *.dev suffix, it becomes a virtual host.

My hosts file is pretty basic:

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1         localhost
255.255.255.255   broadcasthost
::1               localhost
fe80::1%lo0       localhost

My httpd-vhosts.conf file is as follows:

#
# Virtual Hosts
#
# If you want to maintain multiple domains/hostnames on your
# machine you can setup VirtualHost containers for them. Most configurations
# use only name-based virtual hosts so the server doesn't need to worry about
# IP addresses. This is indicated by the asterisks in the directives below.
#
# Please see the documentation at 
# <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/>
# for further details before you try to setup virtual hosts.
#
# You may use the command line option '-S' to verify your virtual host
# configuration.

#
# Use name-based virtual hosting.
#
NameVirtualHost *:80

#
# VirtualHost example:
# Almost any Apache directive may go into a VirtualHost container.
# The first VirtualHost section is used for all requests that do not
# match a ServerName or ServerAlias in any <VirtualHost> block.
#

#allow access to the Hosts directory where your sites are
<Directory "/Volumes/sites">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    #you could configure the following to only allow access from localhost
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

#get the server name from the Host: header
UseCanonicalName Off
VirtualDocumentRoot /Volumes/sites/%0/

This all worked. And I have not changed anything in my httpd.conf file.

Yet I can't load localhost

I also cannot load 127.0.0.1

I ran the command sudo lsof -i :80 | egrep "PID|LISTEN" to see if any PID was listening on port 80. The results were empty.

I have tried to restart apache and also to stop and then start apache using

sudo apachectl stop
sudo apachectl start

sudo apachectl restart

Nothing works.

I checked if apache was running by issuing the command httpd -v

The return was:

Server version: Apache/2.2.26 (Unix)
Server built:   Dec 10 2013 22:09:38

I tried to connect to localhost and 127.0.0.1 via the command line with the following result:

alisamii at alisamii in ~
$ telnet localhost 80
Trying ::1...
telnet: connect to address ::1: Connection refused
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
Trying fe80::1...
telnet: connect to address fe80::1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
alisamii at alisamii in ~
$ telnet 127.0.0.1 80
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
alisamii at alisamii in ~
$ lynx http://localhost

Looking up localhost
Making HTTP connection to localhost
Alert!: Unable to connect to remote host.

lynx: Can't access startfile http://localhost/
alisamii at alisamii in ~
$ lynx http://127.0.0.1

Looking up 127.0.0.1
Making HTTP connection to 127.0.0.1
Alert!: Unable to connect to remote host.

lynx: Can't access startfile http://127.0.0.1/
alisamii at alisamii in ~

Please help.