Crossing the fin(n)ish line

Apart from Ducati (now a part of Audi AG) every single site presented a link to the creators of the website. One of the sites seems to have been a labour of a single Freelancer individual.

This is great as it displays that the web continues to be a domain where you don’t need to have large budgets and whizzbang technologies to support a global business.

Like in the Formula 1 article I grouped the sites with four technologies (back end and delivery):

Technology platform

Publishing tool in use

Delivery layer

Vendor

Details of each site are presented in a section below.

Technology platform

PHP is the number web one platform in MotoGP, with 7 out of 11 sites using it — yes, the numbers are exactly the same as in Formula 1. The ASP.NET framework from Microsoft comes in second with two sites. The odd ones out are Java and Ruby with one each.

Publishing tool in use

Joomla! and WordPress are the most popular open source content management systems with two sites running each. The CodeIgniter framework powered ExpressionEngine CMS powers one site. The rest are a mix of custom implementations on different frameworks, including one on Laravel.

Delivery layer

In Formula one most sites run a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for delivering assets quickly from a location close to the user. In MotoGP apparently none of the sites prominently use this technology, but make do with hosting services from small players to large specialists like the French company OVH.

Vendor

I was able to find out each and every company behind the implementation of the website. Most were small agencies, some specialised on motorsports communications. Ducati being the most corporate with their enterprise experience platform being built by a company of some 700 employees.