As a wordpress developer, I had the opportunity to work in most of the hosting platforms. For one of my clients, I had to work in the wordpress.com platform. I found it easy in the intial stage but things started to look worse when customer requested for custom development. There are few things we need to consider before opting for wordpress.com if you plan to use custom development.

WordPress.com doesn’t provide FTP access?

Are you serious, I understand you want to keep your platform secured but it doesn’t mean that you don’t allow the developers to work on the code. So i created/tested the plugin in the local installation.

I had to install a custom plugin which was generating error due to some conflicts with one of the existing plugin. And the plugin was hidden from the plugins list in wp-admin due to errors.

I had to chat with the support for nearly 2 hours to get things sorted out. The funny part is I am not getting paid for that :(. WordPress.com owe me money since client insisted to pay me for my time with chat support.

Personally I feel wordpress.com is for people who wants everything to work out of the box. If you have a requirement which needs custom development, Get a different hosting provider or get ready to spend some time with chat support. But I had to agree with the fact the support was very friendly and responded quickly.