Something I just learned (yeah, yeah): SSH (and SCP and SFTP) can compress the data is sends and received, but it’s NOT enabled by default. You can enable it per call with the -C flag, or you can just enable it across the board by putting the following in ~/.ssh/config:

Compression yes
CompressionLevel 9

The CompressionLevel is optional and defaults to 6. The values range from 1 to 9, where 1 is the fastest and 9 is the most compressed.