title: Why to convert SHA1 to base64 before storing?
body: <p>I need to store passwords in my SQL database. Too high security is not needed at the moment, but instead of using MD5 hash with seed, I plan to use SHA1+seed to store my passwords.</p>
  
  <p>Usage would be simply for a web site user login. So when a user logs in, my C# code would concatenate a salt+password, hash it, and then compare against whats stored in the database.</p>
  
  <p>My question is that in SQL server, should I be storing the SHA1 has as-is (40 characters), or after converting them to Base64(28 characters)? </p>
  
  <p>Most of the example of SHA1 hashing I saw online, seem to be finally converting it to Base64, but I am not sure, why or what would be the benefit of storing SHA1 after encoding to Base64.</p>