Transferring an existing domain involves switching the company that provides the domain registration service, so after the transfer, you will have to manage things like renewal payments or DNS entry updates through the new registrar. The transfer procedure itself is standard with most universal and country-specific Top-Level Domain extensions. Certain country-code extensions are more specific and entail different procedures, but in the general case transferring a domain name entails a few basic steps and one of them is unlocking the domain name. The domain lock is a security feature, which is being adopted by more and more domain registry organizations. It is a standard feature supported by all generic top-level domain names. If a domain is locked, it will be impossible to start a transfer process, so no one can even attempt to snatch your domain name. The lock can be annulled only through the account where the domain is registered in the first place and all new domains that support this functionality are locked by default the moment they are registered.