I have a domain from my old web host, which was free with my hosting account.

After a few years, I am moving to a VPS. Most of my other domains were registered with Namecheap, so it was just a matter of changing a few DNS records.

However, given that my old host does not provide me with a DNS control panel, and I don't want to be paying a full hosting bill for just domains, I'm now looking into transferring it.

My old host says there will be a charge of $15 to them. NameCheap's page seems to imply you don't need the current registrar to do anything, but it also seems to be based on sending an email to the one listed in whois.

Of course, my old host have whoisguard on the domain so the only email on it is [email protected] (and not a unique [email protected], just [email protected]) which doesn't go to me. Again, there doesn't seem to be an option to disable this.

So, is it a case of paying my old host's fee, and paying again for the domain from NameCheap, or is there some other way to transfer my domain?

(I'm not really sure which of the trilogy sites this is best for.)