Things may have improved recently in the UK, but a couple of years ago it wasn&#x27;t unheard of for hosting companies to charge significant release fees for domain transfers, and to delay transfers for weeks or months - sometimes for so long the national registrar had to get involved.<p>Another popular scam was to lock access to an account when a charging period expired so the owner couldn&#x27;t access any domain transfer tools, and only allow access and transfers on payment of <i>another full year of hosting.</i><p>It&#x27;s a shady business. IMO there&#x27;s no real reason why it should be.