I have a boring webhost which is sat behind Cloudflare. I push my code up to Gitlab and have a simple deployment script set up which automatically SSH's into my webhost and pulls down my latest changes.
Laravel allows to me dev locally with ease and makes common tasks like form validation, db migrations and various other things a breeze. When I'm done I merge to main, `git push` and my changes are live. It's great.
If you have some experience with PHP and have been a web developer for some time you'll have no problem picking up Laravel. I've always found the docs to be great and it's very intuitive to work with.
Some years ago I was a PHP dev, but professionally I tend to work with Node, Java and Kotlin these days. I wouldn't use any of them for personal projects though. I find I'm far more productive in Laravel and the ecosystem is mature enough that I know anything I write will be good for years. Plus, deployment is cheap and simple. I pay a fix price (around $100 a year) for my webhost and for that I get "unlimited" domains, storage and DBs. It's a bit slow on it's own, but behind Cloudflare it works great.
PHP is super underrated imo. It's perfect for small - medium sized projects on a budget!