Usually, when I want to mass-upload a website full of HTML files to my server, I create a ZIP file locally, transfer the ZIP file by FTP, and then login to the shell and unzip it.

Is there an easier way to do this? I'm wondering if there are FTP clients/servers that can transparently compress the files before transferring them, and decompressing them upon receipt (like Apache mod_gzip does with HTTP requests).

I'm using a dedicated server, so I can install software.

This can be done using SFTP and/or SCP, the file transfer tools in the SSH suite (http://www.openssh.org/).

HTH