title: ASP.NET MVC login page returns 401 (unauthorized access) after publishing to hosting provider
body: <p>In order to provide secure access to some administrative backend for a very restricted group of users I used forms based authentication to some secured controller actions. In my case web.config contains something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;authentication mode="Forms"&gt;
    &lt;forms loginUrl="~/User/Login" timeout="2880"&gt;
      &lt;credentials passwordFormat="SHA1"&gt;
         &lt;user name="some-user" password="fb223245bd5488866347724c2c95dbe4bb5ac906"/&gt;
      &lt;/credentials&gt;
    &lt;/forms&gt;
  &lt;/authentication&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As I don't need membership providers and the user is hard coded, membership (and roles) is not configured.</p>
  
  <p>This worked fine in my development environment (VS2010 + integrated web server) until I published the site to the hosting provider. Now everytime I navigate to the User/Login action the server returns errorcode 401 - unauthorized access.</p>
  
  <p>Any idea how to solve this problem? Are there any IIS configuration issues?</p>
  
  <p>Hosting Environment:
  * IIS 7
  * .NET 4.0 / ASP.NET 4.0 MVC2 enabled</p>
  
  <p>thanks in advance, Reinhard</p>