Transferring an existing domain name involves switching the registrar company that handles the registration service, so after the transfer itself, you’ll have to manage things like renewal fees or DNS record updates through the new registrar. The transfer procedure itself is standard with most top-level domain name extensions. Some country-code extensions are more specific and entail different procedures, but in the general case transferring a domain involves a few necessary procedures and one of them is unlocking the domain name. The domain lock is a safety feature, which is being adopted by more and more domain registry organizations. It is a default feature supported by all gTLDs. If a domain name is locked, it will be impossible to initiate a transfer process, so no one can even try to take your domain name. The domain lock can be removed only through the account where the domain name is registered and all new domain names that support this functionality are locked by default the moment they are registered.