`apachectl -t` checks the .conf files for syntax errors.

For this reason, there's zero excuse for ever having an Apache install crash from a typo.

> You should be doing something like "/sbin/service httpd restart".

The 'service' equivalent is: service httpd configtest

> Why go ghetto?

What does 'going ghetto' mean exactly?

Lots of production installations don't use distro-supplied binaries for their critical services (and there are lots of good reasons for doing this). They generally won't work with (or have) the distro-supplied initscripts.

Note that systemd makes it a lot cleaner and simpler to supply your own service definitions, so eventually your intuition will probably be right, and systemctl will be the proper interface to everything.

I believe he was testing the config, not restarting the server.