Allright, I've actually looked on the forum for this and all I get is threads describing problems with SQL authentication and so on.

What I am looking for is much different.

I gave users the ability to log onto my website. You sign up, your password is stored in the DB, and you can login at will to do whatever you need to do.

This is how it works:
a). New User signs up -> info is stored in SQL.
b). Users logs in -> Password and username stored in cookie
c). User hits restricted page -> Password and username pulled from cookie and checked against database. If not valid, redirect, if ok proceed with loading content.

Now, this for some reason seems really lame. For once, I'm using SQL resources every time the user hits a restricted page. 2, I'm storing the password and username in a cookie.

ITs mostly the second part im worried about. I would like to get away from storing passwords in cookies, is this a possibility?