From Shared hosting and Filezilla/Putty to Git.. I'm lost

Dear readers,

I'm not that old but learned programming and web development in what seems to be an previous era (-:

Learned PHP in the times of PHP4, eventually got into CodeIgniter and when I picked up web development again two years ago I transitioned to Laravel which was the best thing ever (obviously).

Currently managing a Laravel project for a local society. The project utilizes some queue's, is hooked up to G Suite to manage email groups, uses Sentry for bug tracking. The website is hosted @ A2Hosting, shared hosting but with all the PHP/SSH goodies that I required so far. For about 10 euro a month.

All the time the project's been deployed really old school using Filezilla and Putty. Now that another developer is joining in I want to switch to use Git to manage the versioning. However, I'm getting totally lost and confused in the thousands of available tutorials. Is there anyone recognizing this situation who's been through that phase and can explain which is the best course to go or the best tutorial(s) to read?

Basically what I want is very simple: be able to work independently of each other with a co-developer on the website, preferably beeing able to work on multiple new features in parallel which could be deployed to the server separately once a feature is good 2 go. Would be nice to have a graphical overview of which features are being developed (I understand that to be branches)

I understand either Github or Gitlab would be neccesary for this, however, when reading the Gitlab & Laravel tutorial @ Gitlab I get totally sucked up into something I can't grasp and which seems to be over my head (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/laravel_with_gitlab_and_envoy/index.html#initialize-our-laravel-app-on-gitlab)

I've ended up reading and tutorialing from DigitalOcean and AWS to Forge, to then understanding that Forge comes on top of either DO/AWS or another host. And a ton of other different hosting companies. I am however quit happy with A2Hosting and wouldn't mind staying there if we can simple get the co-working part using Git working there.

Help through this 'jungle' would be sincerely appreciated.

Thanks!