We Ran Hetzner Through the Wayback Machine and Our Own Tool

We've used the Wayback Machine for years, mostly for checking what a site looked like a few months back or finding deleted pages. But when we needed it for actual work (monitoring a competitor's pricing, archiving our own site after deployments, building a timestamped evidence trail) the gaps showed up fast. So we ran a side-by-side test to see exactly where those gaps are.

The test page was hetzner.com. On April 6, the Wayback Machine had 3 snapshots for the entire day. We captured the same page 24 times, once every hour. Frequency aside, the Wayback Machine snapshots had a cookie consent banner sitting right on top of the content. It can't click buttons or dismiss overlays before capturing. Our captures dismissed the banner automatically, so the actual page content was visible in every screenshot. If you're archiving pages for evidence or compliance, a cookie banner covering half the content isn't just annoying. It makes the capture useless.

Where the real difference showed up

The other thing that stood out: there's no way to compare two Wayback Machine snapshots side by side automatically. You open two tabs and try to spot the difference yourself. With visual diff, even a tiny change across a few dozen pixels gets flagged and highlighted. We caught a single changed price in a Hetzner server table that way, buried three rows deep. Would have taken five minutes of squinting to spot manually. Set a sensitivity threshold so the noise stays quiet, and when something real moves, you get a notification instead of finding out by accident two weeks later.

They solve different problems, and that's fine. The Wayback Machine is a public library of the internet. It's not trying to be a monitoring tool, and it shouldn't be judged as one. What we needed was a private archive: our own schedules, guaranteed capture frequency, clean screenshots, and automatic comparison between captures. If that matches what you need, we wrote a full comparison of the two approaches with a feature table and pricing breakdown.