Request to apache2 server always redirects to /var/www (Index of /) site

I am currently trying to setup an virtual hosts following this tutorial on DigitalOcean.

The dummy-site I am trying to serve is under /var/www/example/html/index.html. I have not registered an official domain but setup /etc/hosts/ to resolve example.com to the IP address of my server.

I created another conf file called example.conf under /etc/apache2/sites-available and enabled it with sudo a2ensite example.conf and disabled the 000-default.conf.

Now whenever I go to example.com in my browser I get served:

.

This is the same page I would get when directly going to the IP address of my server. Only when I got directly to example.com/example/html I get served the correct index.html.

My current config looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example/html
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

And my /etc/hosts file on my laptop like this:

#<ip-address>   <hostname.domain.org>   <hostname>
<server-ip> example.com

There are some other folders inside /var/www/ as the company I rented the server from had some maintenance sites preinstalled, but that shouldn't matter in this situation. (See edit, this did actually matter).

It feels like I am missing something obvious here, but I can't find a solution for my problem.

Edit:

The obvious thing I was missing, was that 2 additional sites where enabled by default as well. One had the following contents:

# 10_froxlor_ipandport_<ip-address>.conf
# Created 28.11.2019 21:05
# Do NOT manually edit this file, all changes will be deleted after the next domain change at the panel.

<VirtualHost <ip-address>:80>
DocumentRoot "/var/www/"
 ServerName <predefined Server name>
</VirtualHost>

After disabling all the other sites, the request to example.com actually went to the right index.html.

I figure, that the above enabled site actually matched the request coming from my browser and showed the www root directory.

The obvious thing I was missing, was that 2 additional sites where enabled by default as well. One had the following contents:

# 10_froxlor_ipandport_<ip-address>.conf
# Created 28.11.2019 21:05
# Do NOT manually edit this file, all changes will be deleted after the next domain change at the panel.

<VirtualHost <ip-address>:80>
DocumentRoot "/var/www/"
 ServerName <predefined Server name>
</VirtualHost>

After disabling all the other sites, the request to example.com actually went to the right index.html.

I figure, that the above enabled site actually matched the request coming from my browser and showed the www root directory.