title: Simple way to authenticate users in ASP.NET MVC without providers
body: <p>I'm trying to understand how authentication in ASP.NET MVC works. I do not want the built-in MembershipProvider creating a local database behind the scenes. I've also looked at some blog posts talking about custom membership providers. While looking for a much simpler forms authentication model, I found the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie("myusername", true);
  FormsAuthentication.SignOut();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The idea is to send the username and salted hashed password to the database and see if they match a record in there. If the user exists, then I pass the username to SethAuthCookie. My questions are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Should the username be encrypted? </li>
  <li>What happens if there are multiple servers and the user is surfing the website? I believe any one of the servers can serve content to the user, so how do they know if the user has been authenticated?</li>
  <li>What's the preferred way of authenticating users in MVC without providers? Am I on the right track or should I be looking into something else?</li>
  </ul>