I recent topic on CFGURU about clients who blame the technology rather than trying to diagnose the real problem reminded me of a couple of funny tech support stories I thought I would share where the client has incorrectly blamed ColdFusion/Hosting for their problems.
When is ColdFusion not ColdFusion, when it's PHP of course
I had a client (lets call him Dick) kept complaining that their site had stopped working AGAIN usually telling us there was a server problem and to restart CF as it was broken, every time I checked everything was working fine on the server, cf was working etc. They would never give us any more info about the problem other than that CF was broken.
It eventually turned out that they had got their site redeveloped some time ago in PHP and also moved the hosting elsewhere as well, so not only was it not a CF site, but we were not even hosting it :-)
Every so often we will get another email from them saying they have problems with FTP, email or something, and each time we have to explain that we cannot help as we are not their host. Hopefully one day someone will update their records 
2 sites are better than 1
Another client (lets call her Dizzy) emailed us to say that the changes she was making to her site were not showing up and ColdFusion must be broken. Bear in mind that we did not develop her site, so shouldn't be supporting it either really, but i'm such a helpful chap yaknow .
I got her to give me the URL of her admin interface, I logged in saw her changes, made some of my own changes, checked the site and there were the changes, no problems.
I couldn't understand why she couldn't see her changes, I got her to clear her cache, restart browser etc, after many exchanges of emails and phone calls, I eventually got her to send me a screen shot, at which point I noticed that the domain name was totally different to the one she sent me.
It finally transpired there were 2 different domains each hosting an exact copy of the site, one was hosted with us, one was hosted elsewhere.
When she edited her site, she did so on www.domain1.com/admin but then viewed the site on www.domain2.com, why I have no idea, but that was why she couldn't see her changes as she making them on a totally different site.
Unfortunately this happened every time she made changes to her site, she would contact us and we would go through this all over again.
Mar 28, 2011 at 11:16 PM I think that was a conversation on cfguru, not cftalk. Well...I guess you could have seen the same conversation on cftalk, but I remember you posting in a thread on cfguru about this. :)
Mar 29, 2011 at 3:30 AM Great stories.
I had a caller tell me 'i can't get to my website'.
Starting with that, i asked questions ... what do you see? 'i don't know, it is all black'... can you get to google.com? 'i don't know, i just don't see anything'... 'are you online? or just looking at the computer desktop?' ... i don't know it is just black. <long silence> ... Is the computer on? 'i don't know, how do you tell?' <very long silence, some snickering> um... are there any lights on the box under your desk? 'no, but there's a big button... oh! ok, now i guess it is starting up, ok thanks! <click>' ...
This really happened. They didn't know enough to blame cf, but it fits in that genre.
Mar 29, 2011 at 4:07 AM Yap, some stupid people want to blame CF whenever they face Problems. Because they got some people told them about CF is expensive and not compatible for them. Actually, when CF is down or crush, they better discuss with their hosting first about server performance, then discuss with developers. If it's because of CF, don't blame CF, blame to developers.
Mar 29, 2011 at 1:36 PM Well I think CF gets more flak because it is a separate service. You cannot RESTART PHP or .NET for example, you have to restart the web server usually.
Although to be fair, ColdFusion does fall over and have way more problems in a shared hosting environment than any other technology we host, it really isn;t geared toward shared hosting as you do need to tune both CF and Java for your specific application, something you cannot do when you are on a server with 200 other cf apps.
Mar 31, 2011 at 9:08 PM I've always been irritated by the so-called PHP comparisons to CF. The most cited "objective" reason is usually cost. "CF is around $3000 while PHP is free."
This is flat out wrong. Lets compare apples to apples rather than to oranges. In terms of cost, if you are going to compare a CF engine to an equivalent PHP engine, lets make sure you are comparing the correct thing. The enterprise version of PHP is the Zend Production Server. According to their online store, that costs from $5,000 to $7,000. That's a lot more than CF Enterprise.
Secondly if you're comparing the community version of PHP to CF lets compare it to CF's equivalent, the two open source CF engines - Railo and Open Blue Dragon. The cost is basically the same, $0.
However you get so much more out of the box with Adobe CF, or the open source CF engines that a cost comparison is essentially a fallacy.