How can I temporarily restrict access to my website whilst I am testing it in live?

Question

I am currently developing a new website that uses Forms Authentication and would like to deploy my website to it's live domain e.g. http://www.livedomain.com but...

I only want a certain number of testers to be able to access http://www.livedomain.com for testing purposes and anyone else that happens to stumble upon the site needs to be preventing from seeing anything.

I can't use IP Addresses to restrict access because we all have dynamic ISP assigned IP Addresses and it won't be a maintenance overhead keep changing them.

I'm happy to just have a generic login box to get you to my actual domain and then you can login to my site as normal to test the functionality.

I am currently using IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 R2

Hope someone can help. Many Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

My suggestion is to use HTTP authentication (the old school login prompt), which is a feature of BasicAuthentication in IIS. There are some great articles on how to configure this on Microsoft TechNet. Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Setup a mirror / staging version for test purposes. You don't want to fill your code with debugging and testing garbage. And having a staging environment that is identical to production is always useful.