It's still expensive to offer SSL when you have a CDN in front unless you go with just SNI support (which could cost a significant portion of your visitors).

We have CDN backed HTTPS for custom sites on BitBalloon (https://www.bitballoon.com) if you're interested in a Github pages alternative that supports SSL.

Yup - Akamai must be rubbing their hands in glee at this announcement. I've already started the conversations here about how much this is going to cost for big CDN hosted projects...

Now you can contact Github with this announcement and voice your concerns. Now they have more incentive to change it (if people actively voice their issues to Github).

I don't have the best experience with submitting feedback to GitHub and getting good responses, so hopefully someone like @konklone can make that case to them - again.