For some reason Pages must still be backed by a public repo for free accounts.

On Gitlab you can host pages backed by their free private repos, and also if required you can use their free integrated CI to run any static site generator build step you might have.

It's a really good plaform for hosting a blog for free with the 'publish on git push' workflow mentioned above.

Here are some more details about it https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/07/gitlab-pages-setup/ and https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/introduction.h...