often this is due to missing permissions. The windows account the local IIS Application Pool is running with may not have the permission to write to the applications directory. You could create a directory somewhere, give everyone permission to write in it and point your log4net config to that directory. If then a log file is created there, you can modify the permissions for your desired log directory so that the app pool can write to it.
Another reason could be an uninitialized log4net. In a winforms app, you usually configure log4net upon application start. In a web app, you can do this either dynamically (in your logging component, check if you can create a specific Ilog logger using its name, if not -> call configure()) or again upon application start in global.asax.cs.