Hashing algorithms such as sha1 and md5 are not suitable for password storing. They are designed to be very efficient. This means that brute forcing is very fast. Even if a hacker obtains a copy of your hashed passwords, it is pretty fast to brute force it. If you use a salt, it makes rainbow tables less effective, but does nothing against brute force. Using a slower algorithm makes brute force ineffective. For instance, the bcrypt algorithm can be made as slow as you wish (just change the work factor), and it uses salts internally to protect against rainbow tables. I would go with such an approach or similar (e.g. scrypt or PBKDF2) if I were you.