GitHub Pages requires a public repo on the free plan. Two Cloudflare alternatives depending on how private you need to go:

• Cloudflare Pages — deploy from a private repo, site is still publicly accessible
• Cloudflare Pages + Zero Trust — add an Access policy to gate the site behind a login (email OTP, Google, GitHub, etc.)

Zero Trust free tier covers up to 50 users, which is plenty for personal or small-team projects.