Don't Keep Your Spare Key Inside the House

A client's site went down over a lapsed payment. That part was fixable in five minutes. The problem was they couldn't get in to fix it.

Here's how the trap was built, and it was built entirely by accident, one reasonable decision at a time. Their website was on a site builder. They'd bought their business email, the Google Workspace one, through that same site builder, as a convenient add-on. And they logged into the site builder with "Sign in with Google," using that same business email address.

Read that back and you can see it close like a trap. When the payment lapsed, the email went down. Because the email was how they logged in, the login went down with it. To fix the payment, they needed to log in. To log in, they needed the email. To get the email back, they needed to fix the payment. Every door's key had been locked inside one of the other rooms.

"Sign in with Google" is a key, not a convenience

Start with the login part, because it's the one people don't think of as a decision. When you click "Sign in with Google" (or Microsoft, or any of them) to get into a service, you're not just saving yourself a password. You're making that Google account the key to this other thing. No working Google account, no way in.

That's fine when your Google account is rock solid and independent. It's a quiet disaster when your Google account is your business email, and that business email depends on a domain or a payment that can lapse. You've taken the key to the account and hidden it inside a box that the account's own problems can lock. The convenience and the vulnerability are the same click.

One vendor means one thing can fail

Now the other half. Buying your email through the same company that runs your website feels tidy, one bill, one login, one place. And it is tidy, right up until that one place has one problem.

Bundle everything behind a single vendor and a single payment, and you've also bundled all the ways it can go wrong. A lapse that would have taken out just the website now takes out the website, the email, and, if you log in with that email, your ability to fix any of it. You didn't buy convenience. You bought a single point of failure with a friendly interface. The whole system now has one thread you can pull to unravel all of it.

The spare key goes in a neighbour's house

The fix is a habit, and it's the same one you already use in the physical world. You don't keep your spare house key inside the house. You leave it with a neighbour, somewhere the house's own problems can't reach, precisely so that being locked out of the house doesn't also mean being locked out of the spare.

Your accounts want the same arrangement. The email you use to log in and to recover your important accounts should live somewhere independent of those accounts. A plain, separate address, on a provider that has nothing to do with your website, your domain, or the vendor running them. It's not your fancy business email. It's the boring, reliable one whose only job is to always be reachable, so that when something in your paid stack breaks, the key to fixing it is sitting safely outside the locked room.

How to check your own setup

You can walk through this in a few minutes, and it's worth doing before anything is on fire. For each of your critical accounts, the domain registrar, the hosting, the site builder, the payment, and the email itself, ask two things.

What email do I log in and recover with, and does that email depend on any of these same accounts? If you log into your site builder with a Google account, and that Google account is a business email bought through or hosted on that same stack, that's the loop. Untangle it by adding an independent email as a login and recovery option, one that can't go down when the rest does. You don't have to tear anything out. You just have to make sure there's always one door whose key lives outside.

The goal is simple to say and easy to forget: nothing you'd use to recover an account should be able to go down with it. Keep one key with the neighbour. It's the difference between a lapsed payment being a five-minute fix and a two-week ordeal spent trying to prove, from the outside, that the locked house is yours.