Transferring an existing domain name involves switching the company that handles the domain registration service, so after the transfer, you will have to manage things like renewal fees or DNS entry updates through the new company. The transfer procedure itself is standard with most gTLD and ccTLD extensions. Certain country-code extensions are more specific and involve different steps, but in the general case transferring a domain name involves several basic steps and one of them is unlocking the domain. The lock is a safety option, which is being adopted by more and more domain name registry organizations. It’s a standard feature supported by all generic top-level domain names. If a domain name is locked, it won’t be possible to initiate a transfer process, so no one can even try to register your domain name. The domain lock can be removed only through the account where the domain is registered in the first place and all new domain names that support this functionality are locked by default the moment they are registered.