I have a similar setup for my blog and I'm using Netlify for both CI and hosting (free). It's been great! GitHub Actions could probably work well for you if you already have decent hosting.
Any particular guide or set of docs you recommend for that? I've heard a lot of good things about Netlify as far as hosting, and I've been wanting to set up a blog; seems like as good a time as ever to start learning.
Netlify seems to lack basic testing of their client. For example, I found that if you have a repo not hosted on GitHub, trying to publish it will cause the client to dump a stack trace and crash. That, the general whizbang design of the UI, and the state of the docs left me with a poor impression about the quality of Netlify's offerings. "Good" for a free service, maybe, but all their attempts at fancy integrations makes the whole thing less attractive, since it actually creates hassle (for a person needing to dodge it all just to make the most basic, vanilla use out of it).
I've evaluated Netlify for my blog at https://jdsalaro.com and I'd advise against that unless you're missing a CMS on your static site generator. Other than that I personally felt it didn't bring much to the table. I do admit that their CMS is slick, but it wasn't really a feature I needed.
Of course I'm not sure what other people are using them for, but in my case GitLab/GitHub covered all my bases pretty well since I wasn't looking for a pelican/hugo CMS and you still host somewhere else (not Netlify).
Github's main business is not Github Pages or be a CDN.
Netlify's main business is.
Netlify also provides deployment previews for commits and PRs, and a complete CI/CD pipeline that you would have to implement yourself with Github Actions or something else.
The CMS isn't what I need either, but there is so much more than just hosting.