Oops I managed to not check the results of "/etc/init.d/httpd reload" after setting up another site on the server. To avoid this in the future, I added the following two lines to the end of the reload function in /etc/init.d/httpd:

sleep 1
status $httpd

This will tell you if the httpd process is running:

Reloading httpd:                                           [  OK  ]
httpd (pid 28299 28298 28297 28296 28295 28294 28293 28292 28265) is running...

Beware though that there is no way to know whether the httpd has processed the -HUP already (aka: reloaded the new config files). For this small load server, 1 second is plenty. For some of my other servers I would probably increase the sleep.