FTP too slow when sending many small files

Question

Hi

I often have to transfer 4000 small files to a remote server (around 20 MB of data), which I currently only have FTP access to. This operation takes 30 minutes but if I were to send one file sized 20 MB it would take 2 seconds or so. I am looking for an alternative which is faster, and which for example zips the 4000 files into one file, sends the zip file, and unzips it at the remote machine. Are there any file transfer servers that do this?

Note that I have access to installing the alternative server on the remote machine, so i am not limitted to the FTP server.

Thank you very much in advance Jeeji