Member OP
Annual receipt from Hetzner vanished. Billing portal returns 500. Support ticket 45 days, no reply. Need receipt for tax in my country.
Already checked:
- email archives (purged by provider "by mistake")
- PayPal: transaction exists but description is "BH-SVC-2024" only
- bank statement: same useless string
Anyone recover invoice without help from dead host? Need specific tool or method.
Member
Wayback Machine. Search billing portal URL. Sometimes crawled.
Can lah but need exact URL leh
Try this lor:
- search site:billing.hetzner.com
- check around payment date lor
- screenshot is better than nothing lah
Already help friend do this for Vultr last year. Working one.
Also can: paypal dispute center got more details leh. Click transaction, click "view details". Sometimes got invoice PDF hidden there lor.
1. PayPal deep dive
1. A) Classic site: history > download > CSV with memo field
1. B) Sometimes merchant info buried in "View Order Details"
2. WHOIS history
2. I) whoisxmlapi.com for registrar records
2. Ii) old billing emails often in registration history
3. Domain itself
3. A) DNS TXT records sometimes have invoice IDs
3. B) _acme-challenge, _stripe, etc.
4. Wayback Machine
4. A) billing portal URLs
4. B) logged-in pages won't work
5. Nuclear option
5. I) reconstruct from bank + WHOIS + screenshots
5. Ii) tax authority usually accepts this bundle
Member
Which PayPal CSV field had the actual invoice number?
Member
PayPal "view details" trick worked for me with InterServer two years ago
The PDF was not obvious, had to click "Seller info" then some tiny link
Also try your browser's saved passwords page, search for "Hetzner" — old billing portal URLs sometimes sit there if you ever logged in
Did you ever solve this
Hey @minh1987 did any of these work out for you
Been 8 days leh, curious which path you tried
For Hetzner specifically I remember their billing portal had a redirect to /receipts/ path also, not just /invoices/
Might be worth checking Wayback for that too lor
Member OP
Tried this, no PDF but found a merchant reference number I hadn't seen before. Emailed it to Hetzner billing@ and cc'd their payments partner. Auto-reply only so far.
Wayback gave me a login page from March, nothing else.
12 days since anyone replied here — if anyone else is stuck in the same hole, the merchant ref trick is worth 10 minutes. Still need the actual invoice though.
Hey minh1987, 18 days liao — did any of these work for you?
I ask because my friend with the Vultr case tried Wayback also but the billing portal got robots.txt blocked so nothing there
He ended up getting the invoice from the payment processor email directly, not PayPal but the card backend (Stripe dashboard email in his case)
Might be worth checking if Hetzner used someone else and that email still in your inbox lor
Member
Good tip. I dug around there once for a InterServer receipt and the PDF was buried under "seller info" rather than the main transaction view. UI paths change but it's worth poking every expandable section.
Did the Wayback angle work out for you, minh1987? Curious if Hetzner's portal was ever public enough to get crawled.
