The company was founded by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, co-founders of Excite.

In February 2006, JotSpot was named part of Business 2.0, "Next Net 25",[1] and in May 2006, it was honored as one of InfoWorld's "15 Start-ups to Watch".

[4] The service was free, but users needed a domain name, which Google offered for $10.

[9] Following a Turkish regional court ruling in 2009, all pages hosted on Google Sites were blocked in Turkey after it was alleged that one of the pages contained an insult of Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled the blockage a breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (Yildirim v Turkey, 2012).