Hacker News Reader

To incent you to upgrade to the paid version?

That can't be it because the business version has a 2GB limit as well. That's too small to store Windows, OS X, Debian, or FreeBSD DVD images.

The "enterprise" version has a 5GB per-file limit which would meet my needs - for now - but surely they're not expecting a single user to purchase an enterprise account.

It keeps out all the free and essentially unaccountable users who would like to use them for movie/software/game piracy.

Could be to discourage people from storing media there. OS images and videos are probably the biggest things people would store. They're also the most pirated content. My guess is either: a) they don't care to host 100TB of pirated content, or b) they're afraid of the legal ramifications of it. Imposing a file size limit keeps a huge bulk of usage away and a lot of the piracy concerns while not really inconveniencing the vast majority of normal users.