The Internet Sacred Text Archive (ISTA) is a Santa Cruz, California-based website dedicated to the preservation of electronic public domain religious texts. The website was first opened to the public on March 9, 1999 by John Bruno Hare (July 8, 1955 – April 27, 2010), in Santa Cruz, California. 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 reason for its founding was the promotion of religious tolerance through knowledge. Its texts are organized into 77 different categories. The maintenance costs for the website—which as of 2006 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. More information...
According to PR-model, sacred-texts.com is ranked 654th in multilingual Wikipedia, in particular this website is ranked 542nd in English Wikipedia.
The website is placed before foxsports.com and after abs.gov.au in the BestRef global ranking of the most important sources of Wikipedia.
