33.5 Conclusion
The most important factors when choosing an authentication method are security, performance, and ease of use. All the solutions outlined must be measured against these:
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HTTP authentication with .htaccess in Apache is very easy to use if the number of users is not too large. It is secure if SSL is used for basic authentication or if digest authentication is used straight away. In the latter case, however, browsers are excluded, which is rarely what the inventor intended. The performance is okay; SSL or digest authentication makes the whole thing a little slower.
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The main negative aspect of IIS-based authentication is the cumbersome administration via user accounts. It is hardly ever used in practice.
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Manual HTTP authentication ...
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