Transferring an existing domain entails changing the registrar company that provides the domain registration service, so after the transfer, you will have to manage things like renewal fees or DNS record updates through the new company. The transfer process is standard with most universal and country-specific TLD extensions. Some country-code extensions are more specific and involve different steps, but in the general case transferring a domain name involves a few necessary procedures and one of them is unlocking the domain name. The domain lock is a security option, which is being adopted by more and more domain name registry organizations. It is a standard feature supported by all generic top-level domain names. If a domain is locked, it will not be possible to start a transfer process, so nobody can even try to register your domain. The domain lock can be removed only through the account where the domain is registered in the first place and all new domains that support this feature are locked by default the moment they are registered.