Why FreeSewing with its hundreds of thousands of users migrated to statichost.eu

FreeSewing is an open source library for on-demand garment manufacturing. Their flagship site, FreeSewing.eu, provides a growing collection of bespoke sewing patterns - drafted to your exact measurements in real-time, right in your browser.

With hundreds of thousands of registered users (324k user accounts at the time of writing), FreeSewing is a substantial web property. And when Instagram and TikTok influencers discovered the project in late 2025, their traffic became that much more substantial too.

The Challenge: Unexpected Traffic and Build Constraints

FreeSewing had been running its static hosting on Netlify, but October 2025 changed everything. “Some popular influencers on Instagram and TikTok posted about us which drives a lot of traffic to the site,” explains Joost De Cock, FreeSewing’s maintainer. That viral moment pushed bandwidth to 8.3TB in a single month - about 8 times their typical usage.

The sudden traffic spike meant facing enterprise-level pricing that didn’t fit FreeSewing’s community-focused mission. But bandwidth wasn’t the only challenge. FreeSewing’s site uses MDX to transform extensive documentation into JavaScript, creating resource-intensive builds that were already hitting limits on shared build infrastructure.

“This is a problem with builds, and we tend to get OOM errors when using a shared build platform - webpack bundling tends to eat through a lot of memory.”

- Joost De Cock, FreeSewing maintainer

The Solution: Tailored Infrastructure for Complex Builds

After initially addressing the crisis with a self-hosted solution, Joost reached out to statichost.eu to explore a more integrated approach. The goal was straightforward: reliable hosting that could handle traffic spikes, along with automated deployments that would work with FreeSewing’s demanding builds.

The first technical hurdle was getting FreeSewing’s resource-intensive builds working. We increased builder memory to 16GB and adjusted the Node.js heap size to prevent the out-of-memory errors that had plagued webpack bundling on shared platforms. Build caching was configured to furthir reduce build times by 7-8 minutes.

For deployment, webhook-triggered CI/CD replaced Joost’s manual SCP workflow. Previously, he built the site locally and manually deployed. “It’s all pretty low-tech and basic, but it’s robust and given that I’m the only one who publishes site updates anyway, this works,” he explained. “But such a workflow obviously wouldn’t work well when we have a team with many people.”

“Automatic and centralized builds would certainly be an added value because it would make it easier to give some trusted contributors the ability to deploy updates.”

- Joost De Cock, FreeSewing maintainer

The automated pipeline now makes it easy to give contributors deployment access, with unlimited team members supported.

The Results: Handling Scale in Production

In the two weeks following migration, FreeSewing served 4TB of bandwidth across 30 million requests - all without infrastructure issues or manual intervention. The CDN handles traffic spikes automatically, and the increased build resources have eliminated deployment bottlenecks.

For site owners running substantial web properties, the takeaway is clear: static doesn’t mean small. Whether you’re dealing with resource-heavy build processes, serving a global user base, or handling unpredictable traffic patterns, the infrastructure needs to scale with your actual workload - not arbitrary tier limits.

FreeSewing now serves hundreds of thousands of users with automated deployments and predictable performance, even when Instagram influencers drive 8x normal traffic.