The most important thing to remember is that wherever you host your asset... it needs to be **reachable & downloadable**. It cannot live behind a private firewall such as a private Github repo. You need to **use a proper hosting service!**
**If you want to publish cool things on the Ocean Marketplace, then you'll first need a place to host your assets!** You have SO many options where to host your asset including centralized and decentralized storage systems. Places to host may include: Github, IPFS, Arweave, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and your own personal home server (if that's you, then you probably don't need a tutorial on hosting assets). Really, anywhere with a downloadable link to your asset is fine.
In this section, we'll walk you through three options to store your assets: Arweave (decentralized storage), AWS (centralized storage), and Azure (centralized storage). Let's goooooo!
When you publish your asset as an NFT, then the URL/TX ID/CID required to access the asset is encrypted and stored as a part of the NFT's [DDO](../../developers/identifiers.md) on the blockchain. Buyers don't have access directly to this information, but they interact with the [Provider](https://github.com/oceanprotocol/provider#provider), which decrypts the DDO and acts as a proxy to serve the asset.
We recommend implementing a security policy that allows **only the Provider's IP address to access the file** and blocks requests from other unauthorized actors is recommended. Since not all hosting services provide this feature, **you must carefully consider the security features while choosing a hosting service.**
**Please use a proper hosting solution to keep your files.** Systems like `Google Drive` are not specifically designed for this use case. They include various virus checks and rate limiters that prevent the [`Provider`](../../developers/provider/README.md)downloading the asset once it was purchased.
