Sure there was, it was called stash (and then that was bought by atlassian becoming bitbucket). You could host mercurial repos there until just a few years ago.

And at that point, even the use of dvcs was in question, so you could use svn on google's forge, or sourceforge. Launchpad had bzr support too.

It wasn't clear github was going to win until it was clear that git was going to win.