Yes, that would have been fine if your site had an affiliate program but that isn't the case. You'll have to do something else to attract users. Look at sites like filecloud.io, jumbofiles.com, megashare.com, putlocker.com etc. None of them have an affiliate program, yet a large amount of users use their service because their hosts are great for free users.

So something like 1-2mb/s speed would be great. Alongside this, add a captcha ,2-3 minutes wait period between each download and limit free user storage space + file retention ( maybe 500GB + 30 days since last download)