What does it mean to consume water? Like it’s used to cool something and then put back in a river? Or it evaporates? It’s not like it can be used in some irrecoverable way right?

Your domain name resolves fine for me, and it’s true you’ll need to set up https for it to work in a browser, but even with curl I get a timeout. Maybe you stopped running httpd?

The hosts is mostly so your computer can connect out to other websites, but doesn’t matter for being able to connect to something you’re serving.

Instead of httpd, maybe try out Caddy. It makes https pretty simple and free once you have a working Caddyfile.