Be sure to restart your computer after doing these things.
Ok, so let me see if I can explain what all happened today. First off, I did restart after editing the host file and nothing happened. Then I remembered that Safari stopped working around the time that I installed the trial of Little Snitch (it monitors network activity). I have since then uninstalled it, but I read online that someone had the same things happen and they fixed it by reinstalling LS and restarted their mac and Safari worked again. So, I installed LS again AND updated it, restarted, and Kaboom, it worked....Until I pressed my luck. I had kept a copy of the Safari folder (located in Users/myusername/Library/Safari) that contains all my bookmarks and such, and I closed Safari and tried to put those files back so I can keep all my bookmarks. Well, when I opened Safari again, same old thing.....I closed Safari and removed those files thinking that it was those specific files that messed it up, but it never started working again. I have since then uninstalled, reinstalled, restarted, and updated LS and repaired permissions and so on several times and its not helping. I noticed when I deleted the files that I put in the Users/myusername/Library/Safari folder, they never created new ones when I started Safari again. I will try and find the files it created before I overwrited them and restore them, but until then, this is what has happened. Thanks.
*After replacing the files in Users/myusername/library/safari with the ones that were deleted when it started working again, it still doesn't help so I deleted them. Now with the folder empty, I started Safari and the only file it recreates in "WebpageIcons.db" but it doesn't help*