I've seen highly vertical software of no value at all to most people hoarded by illegal downloaders. The size of their collection has an almost fetishistic appeal, a bigger driver than actually using any of it.
Games and some other categories may be an exception, but the overlap of illegal downloaders and potential customers is generally very small, for some packages zero.
@Jacque, if you saw a substantial increase in paid customers after taking down the illegal copy, I'd be interested to know what the software does. That would be a rare occurrence, and I like to learn how these patterns work.
Ironically the was the original founder of Mega. The original vision for the site was a lawless wonderland where nothing is protected and everything is permissible. For the last several years he's been in an extradition battle with the US (he currently lives in NZ), which might have been resolved long ago had it not been for procedural errors on NZ's part, stalling the case through a decade-long appeals process.No hosting service will permit pirating if they find out about it - it's in their EULA, so it's not a matter of honouring your request, it's the law as set by themselves and pretty much every hosting service, and I've never known any service to risk police/fraud investigation
Actually there was one prominent German one that got shut down after fraud investigation, can't remember it's name now...
As for Mega, investors booted him long ago and have worked hard to rebrand the company as a more legitimate business. The need to distance the company from its founder's practices have resulted in an excellent service, one of the quickest to handle DMCA, and with security features not often found in other cloud storage offerings in that process range.
Given Mega's origins, I was initially very opposed to using them. But after much research I've been a happy customer for the last few years.
As for the main question here, TBH I don't understand why every software developer doesn't have a web server. For as little as US$5/mo (sometimes less), shared hosting gets you shareable storage for things like this, and a vast range of other one-click installs for all sorts of useful web apps every business needs, from marketing support with SuiteCRM to organizational coordination with Nextcloud, and a hundred others. And you get a web site. And you can augment that web site with LC Server.
