moving form to a new server/webhost

[snakes1100]

Backing up thru ssh would be a lot faster for you, also as you have ssh access, you can simply ftp thru ssh and send the files directly to the new server.

As far as ssh commands go, if you do not know ssh commands very well, the tar commands might not help you much if you do not know how to use the rest of hte ssh commands, like cd'ing to the right directories etc

tar -cjfp directory-name.bz2 /path/to/directory

That will compress the entire directory for you, so yo ucan tar the entire public_html in one shot.