The website was first opened to the public on March 9, 1999, by John Bruno Hare (1955–2010), in Santa Cruz, California.

[1][2] Hare started building the website from his home in the late 1990s, as "an intellectual challenge".

At the time, he was working as a software engineer with a dot-com company, and started by scanning over 1,000 public domain books on religion, folklore and mythology.

The maintenance costs for the website — which as of 2006[update] received anywhere from five hundred thousand to two million visits a day — are funded by sales of the website on DVD, CD-ROM, or USB flash drive for monetary donations.

[1] The Internet Sacred Text Archive lists three general links, World Religions, Traditions, and Mysteries.