SCP or SFTP?

You're right, Unforgiven. scp has been around forever and has been the program of choice for secure file copying between *nix machines. Sftp is a more fully featured file transfer program.

Notice however that both scp and sftp in their most popular implementation (openssh) are not recommended for transfering large files over fast links, since it's buffers size is optimized for telnet work. There is a patch that addresses this for SCP but not for sftp. The effective increase is amazing (I found it to perform about 8 times better in 100mbs links). In any case Vsftpd over SSL works even faster!

Notice however that both scp and sftp in their most popular implementation (openssh) are not recommended for transfering large files over fast links, since it's buffers size is optimized for telnet work.

I always wondered why file transfers were so slow using WinSCP.

Checked out Vsftpd and it looks interesting. Just wondering how many ISPs run it with their hosting packages.